Programming in Non-C Languages

One of the design goals of the Beast API is to permit its use in as many different programming environments as possible. To that end, the interface has been written in C, and consists mostly of global functions that should be relatively portable to other programming languages. The Beast API has already been successfully used in production from C, C++, C# and Python. It should equally be possible to invoke the API from any other language that can wrap calls to the C functions. However, using the Beast API from a non-C language implies some extra considerations, outlined below.

If your programming language cannot use the header files and import library, you will need to manually load the dynamic library and import the API functions. The exact steps to carry this out depend on the programming language you use.

Most of the API calls should be straightforward to import into your choice of language, with a couple of exceptions: the static ILBSetLogTarget() and ILBCreateManager() functions declared in beastmanager.h. These functions are wrappers around calls to ILBSetLogTargetImp() and ILBCreateManagerImp() respectively. When you import the Beast API into your own language, you will probably need to create your own wrappers for ILBSetLogTargetImp() and ILBCreateManagerImp().

Your wrappers for ILBSetLogTargetImp() and ILBCreateManagerImp() should call ILBSetStringEncodingImp() before any other calls, to set up the string encoding to be used. You can call ILBSetStringEncodingImp() multiple times without problems, as long as you always give it the same string encoding.
The ILBCreateManager() wrapper also passes the value of ILB_BEAST_INTERFACE_VERSION in its call to ILBCreateManagerImp(). This variable is updated in the Beast headers each time a change is made to the interface, and permits the DLL to check that it is being called by an application that uses the same version of the API. In your wrapper for ILBCreateManagerImp(), you need to pass this same value.