Sharing defines or enums between C++ and Java - java

Starting to digg into java, coming from c++. I am calling some functions in java from c++ (qt / Android). I miss a way to predefine some tags shareable between both languages avoiding having to define them twice or using strings.
Something like
define OPERATION_START 0X01
in c that would be compilable/readable in java.
Does something like this exists or you know some trick to achieve it?
Edit: How about something like this:
A java file stuff.java with
public enum Stuff{
Table, Apple, Beach, Eye };
and in Cpp+
'#define public
'#include "stuff.java"
'#undef public
Would that work? java would enumerate from 0 as does c, right?

You need something that can read one of the definitions and export the other.
There are a bunch of things that can do this.
Two that I know of are:
SWIG and protocol buffers.
SWIG will read the C++ declarations and generate code with the same things in other languages.
Protocol buffers will read some proprietary declaration and generate code for all the languages you need.
There are probably others as well, and I don't know of anything that is lighter weight than those. BTW, those are also good for defining more complex structures that you want to pass between C++ and java (and other languages).

You could model the shared definitions/enumerations in UML or maybe a DSL and use code generation from there to create matching definitions in Java and C++.
Or you could probably also define them in Java classes and build a generator which uses reflection to generate matching C++ headers from that.

Related

Simulating C/C++ empty defines in Java

I know Java does not have pre-processor, but I struggle to find a way to do this.
I am looking to create macros to improve code readibility, to specify which of the functions or parameters are for input or output specifically. In C, this would be done like this :
#define IN
#define OUT
And these would just be used before the variables and functions. Can I simulate the same behavior in Java?
I did not manage to find a way to do this. The only way I found was including defines in the code and first using the cpp pre-processor to replace them, and then run the java code, but maybe there is a better way of doing this?
Java indeed does not have a pre-processor, and your use case doesn't require that either: you aren't actually preprocessing the code, you just put in some tags that the compiler can ignore.
What you are looking for are "annotations" - you basically want to annotate your code with some nice text that will not affect the compiler.
This basically requires defining some specialized Java types for this using the #interface keyword and then you can use them to write things like:
public void doStuff(#Input invar, #Output outvar) {
...
These annotations can be simply:
#interface Input {}
#interface Output {}
or you can add more features and even use reflection to examine them in runtime.
See the linked documentation above for more details.

How to automate Java bindings for Rust code?

I want to call Rust code from Java / Android, and I've found 3 variants to do so:
JNI
JNA
JNR FFI
JNI looks good and powerful enough, but you have to
write too much code by hand.
JNA, if not taking into consideration that it crashes on my machine, requires writing Rust struct data type description in Java by hand,
the same problem with JNR FFI.
So I wonder how difficult will be generate JNI code
for traits and struct with macros or a compiler plugin?
This compiler should match traits implementations for concrete struct,
and also struct
#[JNI]
struct Foo {
a: i32,
}
trait Boo {
fn f(&self, b: f64) -> f64;
}
#[JNI]
impl Boo for Foo {
fn f(&self, b: f64) -> f64 {
0f64
}
}
and create Java classes for struct and Java classes with native functions, plus generate pub no_mangle functions that wrap traits functions.
In order to provide #[jni] annotations that work like that you'd need to use a compiler plugin. It would be an awesome tool, but it doesn't exist yet, as far as I know.
There are bits and pieces of tooling lying around that might be helpful, if you want to create a project that does this.
Plugins are currently unstable, and don't work on non-nightly rust; you would probably want to use syntex, which provides a stable interface to compiler plugins. You could also write a raw plugin (see here for the API for those), but most people won't be able to use it.
There's rusty-cheddar, which generates c header files; you could take a look at that to see how it works. The author of that also seems to be working on a more general bindings-generation framework, but I don't know if it's active. You might be able to hook the output of cheddar up to something like JNAerator, but it probably won't create the prettiest interfaces on the java side.
There's also rust-bindgen and corrode, which work in the other direction; they translate c headers and arbitrary c code to rust respectively. I don't know if that's actually helpful.
JNI-sys provides low-level JNI bindings; rust-on-mobile is a small project that uses it. Also see First steps with Rust and Java, a blog post that shows some rudiments of getting things hooked up.
Finally, there's cbox, which lets you work around awkwardness with ownership and FFI.
Finally I created such project (link to github repository) to automate
binding creation.
You can use jnaerator to auto-generate your structure mappings for JNA.
Alternatively, if you want to use JNI (and compile some more native code) you should go with SWIG.

Programatic code modification (e.g. variable extraction) in Java

I know it's possible to do nice stuff with Reflection, such as invoking methods, or altering the values of fields. Is it possible to do heavier code modification, though, at runtime and programmatically?
For instance, if I have a method:
public void foo(){
this.bar = 100;
}
Can I write a program that modifies the innards of this method, notices that it assigns a constant to a field, and turns it into the following:
public int baz = 100;
public void foo(){
this.bar = baz;
}
Perhaps Java isn't really the language to do this kind of thing in - if not, I'm open to suggestions for languages that would allow me to basically reparse or inspect code in this way, and be able to alter it so precisely. I might be pipe dreaming here though, so please tell me if this is the case also.
Just adding a suggestion from a friend - Apache Commons' BCEL looks excellent:
http://commons.apache.org/bcel/manual.html
The Byte Code Engineering Library (Apache Commons BCEL™) is intended to
give users a convenient way to analyze, create, and manipulate (binary)
Java class files (those ending with .class). Classes are represented by
objects which contain all the symbolic information of the given class:
methods, fields and byte code instructions, in particular.
Such objects can be read from an existing file, be transformed by a
program (e.g. a class loader at run-time) and written to a file again.
An even more interesting application is the creation of classes from
scratch at run-time. The Byte Code Engineering Library (BCEL) may be
also useful if you want to learn about the Java Virtual Machine (JVM)
and the format of Java .class files.
You are looking for software that allows you to do bytecode manipulation, there are several frameworks to achieve this, but the two most known currently are:
ASM
javassist
When performing bytecode modifications at runtime in Java classes keep in mind the following:
If you change a class's bytecode after a class has been loaded by a classloader, you'll have to find a way to reload it's class definition (either through classloading tricks, or using hotswap functionalities)
If you change the classes interface (example add new methods or fields) you will be able only to reach them through reflection.
It's probably fair to say that Java wasn't designed with this purpose in mind, but you can do it potentially. How and when depends a little on the ultimate aim of the exercise. A couple of options:
At the source code level, you can use the Java Compiler API to
compile arbitrary code into a class file (which you can then load).
At the bytecode level, you can write an agent that installs a
ClassFileTransformer to arbitrarily alter a class "on the fly"
as it is loaded. In practice, if you do this, you will also probably
make use of a library such as BCEL (Bytecode Engineering
Library) to make manipulating the class easier.
You want to investigate program transformation systems (PTS), which provide general facilities for parsing and transforming languages at the source level. PTS provide rewrite rules that say in effect, "if you see this pattern, replace it by that pattern" using the surface syntax of the target language. This is done using full parsers so the rewrite rule really operates on language syntax and not text; such rewrite rules obviously won't attempt to modify code-like text in comments, unlike tools based on regexps.
Our DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit is one of these. It provides not only the usual parsing, AST building and prettyprinting (reproducing compilable source code complete with comments), but also supports symbol tables and control and data flow analysis. These are needed for almost any interesting transformations. DMS also has front ends for a variety of dialects of Java as well as many other languages.
Bytecode transformers exist because they are much easier to build; it is pretty easy to "parse" bytecode. Of course, you can't make permanent source changes with a bytecode transformer, so it is lot less useful.
You mean like this?
String script1 = "println(\"OK!\");";
eval( script1 );
script1 += "println(\"... well, maybe NOT OK after all\");";
eval( script2 );
Output:
OK!
OK!
... well, maybe NOT OK after all
... use a scripting extension to Java. Groovy and other things like that would probably allow you to do what you want. I've written a scripting extension which integrates with Java through reflection almost seamlessly myself; contact me if you're interested in the details.

Which JVM-based language should I use for mapping of one type to another?

I'm currently working with Java to write a program that does an EAI between two applications. One application comes with HL7, which I parse with HAPI. So I get a Java object structure. I want to transform this structure to my own structure that I want to use to generate XML files with JAXB after doing some other work.
In my opinion my current solution is not very nice, because the source code gets very complex:
public NaturalPerson convertPID(PID pid) {
NaturalPerson person = new NaturalPerson();
NameNaturalPerson personsname = new NameNaturalPerson();
name.setFamilyName(pid.getPatientName().getFamilyName().getValue());
...
}
Which language is an appropiate Language to do such type mappings? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages)
I think Java is not the best language for doing that. I don't have much time for learning, so I need a language that is easy to learn and which has a low begin-of-learning-peek. I already have some experience in the functional languages Haskell and F#. First I thought Groovy would be a good language, but then I found other opinions that suggest Scala.
Which language would you suggest for doing such type mappings?
Did you look at Dozer? It is a Java library that recursively copies data from one Java object to another. There are several ways to configure the mapping:
XML
Java API providing a DSL
Java annotations
Data in forms of Maps and Vectors handling are superbly handled on the JVM using Clojure
See all the core functions available and this SO Question on which tutorials are good to learn Clojure.

Java -> Python?

Besides the dynamic nature of Python (and the syntax), what are some of the major features of the Python language that Java doesn't have, and vice versa?
List comprehensions. I often find myself filtering/mapping lists, and being able to say [line.replace("spam","eggs") for line in open("somefile.txt") if line.startswith("nee")] is really nice.
Functions are first class objects. They can be passed as parameters to other functions, defined inside other function, and have lexical scope. This makes it really easy to say things like people.sort(key=lambda p: p.age) and thus sort a bunch of people on their age without having to define a custom comparator class or something equally verbose.
Everything is an object. Java has basic types which aren't objects, which is why many classes in the standard library define 9 different versions of functions (for boolean, byte, char, double, float, int, long, Object, short). Array.sort is a good example. Autoboxing helps, although it makes things awkward when something turns out to be null.
Properties. Python lets you create classes with read-only fields, lazily-generated fields, as well as fields which are checked upon assignment to make sure they're never 0 or null or whatever you want to guard against, etc.'
Default and keyword arguments. In Java if you want a constructor that can take up to 5 optional arguments, you must define 6 different versions of that constructor. And there's no way at all to say Student(name="Eli", age=25)
Functions can only return 1 thing. In Python you have tuple assignment, so you can say spam, eggs = nee() but in Java you'd need to either resort to mutable out parameters or have a custom class with 2 fields and then have two additional lines of code to extract those fields.
Built-in syntax for lists and dictionaries.
Operator Overloading.
Generally better designed libraries. For example, to parse an XML document in Java, you say
Document doc = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder().parse("test.xml");
and in Python you say
doc = parse("test.xml")
Anyway, I could go on and on with further examples, but Python is just overall a much more flexible and expressive language. It's also dynamically typed, which I really like, but which comes with some disadvantages.
Java has much better performance than Python and has way better tool support. Sometimes those things matter a lot and Java is the better language than Python for a task; I continue to use Java for some new projects despite liking Python a lot more. But as a language I think Python is superior for most things I find myself needing to accomplish.
I think this pair of articles by Philip J. Eby does a great job discussing the differences between the two languages (mostly about philosophy/mentality rather than specific language features).
Python is Not Java
Java is Not Python, either
One key difference in Python is significant whitespace. This puts a lot of people off - me too for a long time - but once you get going it seems natural and makes much more sense than ;s everywhere.
From a personal perspective, Python has the following benefits over Java:
No Checked Exceptions
Optional Arguments
Much less boilerplate and less verbose generally
Other than those, this page on the Python Wiki is a good place to look with lots of links to interesting articles.
With Jython you can have both. It's only at Python 2.2, but still very useful if you need an embedded interpreter that has access to the Java runtime.
Apart from what Eli Courtwright said:
I find iterators in Python more concise. You can use for i in something, and it works with pretty much everything. Yeah, Java has gotten better since 1.5, but for example you can iterate through a string in python with this same construct.
Introspection: In python you can get at runtime information about an object or a module about its symbols, methods, or even its docstrings. You can also instantiate them dynamically. Java has some of this, but usually in Java it takes half a page of code to get an instance of a class, whereas in Python it is about 3 lines. And as far as I know the docstrings thing is not available in Java

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