Utilities
On top of providing initialization APIs, the knee-runtime
package contains a thin layer of utilities
wrapping the JNI APIs in a way
that's more comfortable to Kotlin users.
The
knee-runtime
package is automatically added to your project by the Gradle Plugin.
Environment and Virtual Machine
We define two handy typealiases for the common JNI entry points, *JNIEnv
and *JavaVM
:
kotlintypealias JniEnvironment = CPointer<JNIEnvVar>
typealias JavaVirtualMachine = CPointer<JavaVMVar>
At any point after Knee initialization, you can:
- fetch the machine with
val machine = io.deepmedia.tools.knee.runtime.currentJavaVirtualMachine
- fetch the machine's environment with
val environment = machine.env
.
Due to JNI design, the machine's environment will only be non-null if it was previously attached to the current thread.
You can attach and detach the environment using regular JNI APIs, or use the useEnv { }
utility:
kotlinval jvm = currentJavaVirtualMachine
jvm.useEnv { environment ->
// useEnv attaches the current thread, and detaches it later
// unless an environment was already available, in which case it does no attach/detach
}
API wrappers
Most JNI APIs are available as extension functions to JniEnvironment
and JavaVirtualMachine
.
These function generally respect the original name and semantics, avoiding I/O conversions. For example:
JniEnvironment.getBooleanField()
returns ajboolean
, not aBoolean
JniEnvironment.newIntArray()
returns ajintArray
, not anIntArray
This design choice stems from the hope that, when using Knee, you shouldn't need to deal with JNI APIs at all, so the wrappers can be more performant by avoiding opinionated conversions.
The only exception to this rule is, well, exceptions: our wrappers automatically check return codes to be JNI_OK
and, where appropriate, invoke ExceptionCheck
, ExceptionOccurred
, ExceptionClear
, and throw a Throwable
.
As an example, this is how, given an environment, you may create a JVM object and invoke a function on it.
kotlinfun getClassFieldOrThrow(env: JniEnvironment): Long {
val objectClass: jclass = env.findClass("com/example/MyClass")
val objectConstructor: jmethodID = env.getMethodID(objectClass, "<init>", "()V")
val objectInstance: jobject = env.newObject(objectClass, objectConstructor)
val fieldMethod: jmethodID = env.getFieldId(objectClass, "myField", "J")
val fieldValue: Long = env.getLongField(objectInstance, fieldMethod)
return fieldValue
}
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