Factor Language Blog

A Java programmer has realized that JNI is a steaming pile of shit. He writes:

*The more I think about it, the more I think something like the following would make sense:
*

@Native(dll=foo,function=bar)
public void bar();

Damn right it makes sense. There is no good reason one should have to program in C, and learn the internals of their language runtime, to call C libraries, even those involving structures, callbacks, and so on.
The Java OpenGL binding is 40,000 lines of Java code, including some hairy Java and C source generation, and a complicated build process (when I was doing my Java game, I never managed to get JoGL to compile, even after downloading half a dozen dependencies and playing with the build.xml. I always used the binary packages).
The Factor OpenGL binding is less than 2,000 lines of code consisting of a handful of source files. We also have bindings to FreeType, Cocoa, WinAPI, a USB library, and various other things, all implemented in Factor, without huge amounts of boilerplate or C code.