On 2012-03-29 14:44, Chris W. wrote:
Thanks for the link. Objective-C is basically C and can be implemented
in C style as far as I know. Is it worth going down to the C level like so:
Yes that would be possible.
struct NSObject {
struct objc_class* isa;
}
struct objc_class {
Class isa;
Class super_class;
const char *name;
long version;
long info;
long instance_size;
struct objc_ivar_list *ivars;
struct objc_method_list **methodLists;
struct objc_cache *cache;
struct objc_protocol_list *protocols;
}
Just a random thought.
That's the alternative approach, I've done that as well. It's very
tedious and becomes verbose very fast.
Both I and Michel have created an Objective-C/D bridge that uses this
approach. It lets you call Objective-C methods, create instances of
Objective-C classes, create subclasses in D that inherit from
Objective-C classes and so on. It did this all automatically. The
problem with the bridge was the enormous template bloat. A GUI Hello
World application takes around 60MB with the bridge.
http://www.dsource.org/projects/dstep
http://michelf.com/projects/d-objc-bridge/
That's why Michel started the DMD fork to directly support binding to
Objective-C classes and methods.
If you just have a small amount of Objective-C code that needs to be
called and basically never changes then it won't be a problem using the
Objective-C runtime functions. Otherwise I wouldn't recommend it.
I've ported the SDL initialization code for Mac OS X to D, to be used in
derelict. This doesn't contain any fancy templates like the bridge uses
to help making the code less verbose. It's quite a lot of D code
compared to the Objective-C code:
http://dsource.org/projects/derelict/browser/branches/Derelict2/DerelictSDL/derelict/sdl/macinit
This would be the original Objective-C code:
http://codespeak.net/svn/pypy/dist/pypy/rlib/rsdl/macosx-sdl-main/SDLMain.m
If you're going with this approach you could have a look at my bridge if
you need help, it has some useful documentation of how it works and is
implemented:
http://www.dsource.org/projects/dstep/wiki/ObjcBridge/BridgeInternals
--
/Jacob Carlborg
