Godot-proposals: Add ability to load DLL modules without using GDNative

[RevoluPowered]

Describe the project you are working on

A game I want to publish on steam

Describe the problem or limitation you are having in your project

We can't integrate the SteamSDK with a little amount of tool setup.

Describe the feature / enhancement and how it helps to overcome the problem or limitation

Why:

• No compiler, only Godot. :cake:
• Less layers and tools setup
• Can be used for advertising APIs with less c knowledge, much like p invoke from c#
• Can be used for proprietary SDK's
• Distribution is just a zip

Directory structure:

• docs/
  
  
  
  • Whatever documentation or licensing
  
  
• bin/linux
  
  
  
  • SteamAPI.so
  
  
• bin/windows
  
  
  
  • SteamAPI.dll
  
  
• bin/osx
  
  
  
  • SteamAPI.dylib
  
  
• scripts
  
  
  
  • SteamSDK.gd
  
  

Packaging:

• Dump into SteamSDK.zip (ZIP File) or optionally as Folder SteamSDK extracted.
• Project folder: res://plugins/SteamSDK.zip

Loading modules

• Must explicitly be enabled in the project.config for security even if you call the module API.

Implement DLL API for standard SDK files like SourceSDK.dll

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-bxJ0CZb6_Ceuv-SmGCO4YV-lse8NjmRQWvGFlDvL6Y/

Describe how your proposal will work, with code, pseudo-code, mock-ups, and/or diagrams

var module = load_module("SteamAPI")
func authentication_response(user_data : UserStruct, status : String):
    print(“User has authenticated “ + user_data.name)

)
var authenticate = module.bind(“authenticate_steam”, authentication_response)

Please see this document for the below points:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-bxJ0CZb6_Ceuv-SmGCO4YV-lse8NjmRQWvGFlDvL6Y

If this enhancement will not be used often, can it be worked around with a few lines of script?

no

Is there a reason why this should be core and not an add-on in the asset library?

it is core

[pycbouh]

First questions that pops to my mind: how should GDScript handle native types without any translation layer that is created manually when you wrap 3rd party libraries into modules/gdnative classes?

[RevoluPowered]

We'd most likely use something like this as a good template for the implementation:

• https://docs.python.org/3/library/ctypes.html

handles all the potential cases for binding c structs correctly, which at first would be good enough to me.

There is the pinvoke method too from csharp but we probably wouldn't use it as a template, the ctypes system is so similar to gdscript it could be used as a template, and we could make further simplifications, if we don't need all the bells and whistles it has.

[RevoluPowered]

Another option is using an FFI (this has less performance issues with JIT compilation, should GDScript add it later)
https://luajit.org/ext_ffi.html

They're always faster than using c functions from a jit compiled language. (since standard c calls to c functions are always slower when you have JIT compilation, as it interrupts the jit compilation. which was a constant source of frustration with garrysmod for example because the jit compilation would die every time you called back into the C++ code the FFI prevents this slowdown if memory serves me correctly.

Ideally we start small though, with something very simple and work from there.