Interface for .NET languages

[burkenyo]

Abstract

An interface will be created to provide access to Cantera through programming languages in the .NET ecosystem. The interface will be available as a Nuget package, allowing users to integrate Cantera directly into their project using familiar paradigms.

Motivation

With the turn towards open-source and cross-platform that begun with .NET Core, coupled with crucial investments in the runtime and libraries to allow high-performance code, there is increasing interest in the community in using .NET for scientific computing.

In addition, there is a desire to extend Cantera to other languages such as Julia, using the C-interface for interop with the native Cantera library. The work on the .NET interface will take a first pass at implementing a source generator to scaffold code from the C-interface, as decscribed in #39.

Description

[TBD]

The initial version will support .NET Standard 2.0 (with the addition of nullable reference type attributes and memory types provided by Nuget packages) and .NET 6. This means the APIs not present in .NET Standard 2.0 (or provided by those two Nuget packages) will not be used.
String comparison in the C# layer will be performed with StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase or StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase

Tasks

• Initial commit with an example
• Hook build system up to scons
• Integrate with CI

More tasks TBD re: mapping more and more functionality from CLib

• Develop Nuget packaging strategy for core library
• Develop Nuget packaging strategy for examples

TBD: develop Conda packaging strategy?

References

https://github.com/burkenyo/cantera/tree/dotnet-interface

[burkenyo]

Hi, I’ve created this stub issue so that I have the number. I will flush it out soon.

[ischoegl]

One interesting factoid I just found (while trying to debug CMake for Cantera's standard C++ samples, where it generates .sln and .vcxproj files, among others) is that C# projects are supported by CMake as well (see SO discussion). (PS: since support may be limited to Windows, it may not be that interesting after all)