On 2012-02-21 20:45, Manu wrote:
On 21 February 2012 20:12, Jacob Carlborg <d...@me.com
<mailto:d...@me.com>> wrote:
On 2012-02-21 18:03, Manu wrote:
On 21 February 2012 16:59, Michel Fortin
<michel.for...@michelf.com <mailto:michel.for...@michelf.com>
I have some experience bridging Objective-C and D. I once
built a
complete wrapper system for Objective-C objects, each object was
wrapped by a D one. It worked very well, but it generated so
much
bloat that it became unusable as soon as I started defining
enough
classes for it to be useful. See the D/Objective-C bridge:
<http://michelf.com/projects/____d-objc-bridge/
<http://michelf.com/projects/__d-objc-bridge/>
<http://michelf.com/projects/__d-objc-bridge/
<http://michelf.com/projects/d-objc-bridge/>>>.
What was the primary cause of the bloat? I can't imagine my proposal
causing any more bloat than the explicit jni call (or
equivalent) woudl
have otherwise.
Template bloat. Every call bridging D/Objective-C is made throw a
series of templates. This is for making it possible (less verbose)
to create bindings.
It might be possible to decrease the template bloat by having a tool
that automatically generates the bindings and outputs what the
templates do inline.
Why aren't the templates inline themselves? Although if the templates do
a lot of work, wouldn't that INCREASE the code volume?
I can't really imagine how Obj-C linkage could bloat so much, what was
involved? What did you have to do in addition to what a regular Obj-C
function call would have done?
Michel Fortin explained this better in two of his answers. You can also
read the documentation of my implementation, very similar to Michel's:
http://www.dsource.org/projects/dstep/wiki/ObjcBridge/BridgeInternals
But to give a quick example:
class Foo : NSObject
{
Foo foo ()
{
return invokeObjcSelf!(Foo, "foo");
}
Foo bar ()
{
return invokeObjcSelf!(Foo, "bar");
}
}
"invokeObjcSelf" is a template function that calls an Objective-C
method. Basically each time "invokeObjcSelf" is called a new
instantiation of the template is created and that is put in the symbol
table. "invokeObjcSelf" then calls several more template functions
making the template bloat increase exponentially.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
