Using a .NET DLL in Node.js / serverside javascript

Question

I have a pet project that is an online game, the entire game engine is written in C# and I would like to know if there is anyway I can call the functions of this existing as

Answer 1

The following answer is out of date, but still helpful for understanding of Node.js from first release
Node.js is now also available natively for Windows at nodejs.org. No cygwin requirement or otherwise.

First of all, at the moment there's no native Windows port of Node.js, there's only a cygwin version (but I suspect you already knew that).

There was a node module floating around somewhere at the GitHubs that provided wrappers for calling into native libraries, but iirc, that only worked with .so libs.

Therefore, if you want to use a C# DLL, you will first have to write a native Node.js extension as the interface:
https://www.cloudkick.com/blog/2010/aug/23/writing-nodejs-native-extensions/

From that extension you have to load the DLL and wrap the calls from Node.js to the C# code, that means you have to write some low level C/C++ code and convert C# values to V8 stuff.

I only have experience with C++ and V8, it's a bit hard to get started since the code examples are a bit sparse, also wrapping C++ classes is not that trivial. But I did wrote small JS game engine kind of thing, that uses a C++ OpenGL backend, it's unfinished (and there are hardly any comments) but it might give you some ideas.

Note: There are some projects in the wild that provide somewhat automatic generation of wrappers to V8, but those are C++ only.

So to conclude, I think it will be quite adventurous getting the C# wrappers to work, but it should be possible.

Answer 2

Edge.js supporting node's last versions and .net core with a new edge-js package.

Support for Node.Js 6.x, 7.x, 8.x, 9.x, 10.x, 11.x Support for .NET

Core 1.0.1 - 2.x on Windows/Linux/macOS. Support for Mono runtime

4.8.x - 5.x.

Can be installed (npm i edge-js) from https://www.npmjs.com/package/edge-js