External Symbols

[ryanwilsond]

Description

Postponed:

While developing the metadata processing section of the code, I found that Belte simply doesn't have enough language sophistication to properly represent (and hence interop) with many .NET symbols. To get around this, most of the PE symbol API is directly copied from Roslyn to properly hold C# symbol state, but at the current moment it is too superfluous. The current PE symbol API compiles with no errors/warnings, so it will sit there until the language is more mature and this feature is revisited.

Even so, the ability to compile Belte code into workable DLLs was a new useful feature added in this PR.

Allows Belte source to reference symbols defined in DLLs using Metadata. Only allows referencing symbols with exact type mapping, for example:

System.Int64 -> int
System.Double -> decimal
System.Boolean -> bool
System.String -> Nullable<string>
System.Object -> Nullable<Object>
...

Will eventually add all native .NET types to the LowLevel namespace to allow referencing more symbols.

Type of change

Please delete options that are not relevant.

• New feature (non-breaking change which adds functionality)