Re: [DotGNU]Cocoa#

[Rhys Weatherley]

On Sunday 12 October 2003 04:23 pm, Rhys Weatherley wrote:
> We should look into the Objective-C ABI to see if we can do better
> with that language.

I had a look through Apple's Objective-C documentation, and I think this is 
doable.  The <objc/objc-api.h> interface contains a number of functions that 
can be used to walk the class hierarchy at runtime, enumerate all of the 
methods, create objects, send messages, etc.

There would be two parts to wrapping up Cocoa in C#.  The first would involve 
writing a C program which walks the Objective-C classes and outputs the 
corresponding C# definitions, with all of the necessary interop attributes 
and what-not in place.  This would be mostly automatic, I think.

The second part is hooking up object instantiation and message dispatch.  You 
could import the "objc-api" helper functions from "libobjc4.dylib", and call 
them directly from the C# constructors and methods.  A simple "IntPtr" would 
be used to represent the actual Objective-C object.

Constructors would call "objc_lookUpClass" and then "class_createInstance".  
Methods would call "class_getInstanceMethod" followed by "obj_msgSendv".  Or 
something like that.  It may be possible to do all of this in Portable.NET 
now, using the current PInvoke facilities.

Eventually, we could move the "objc-api" stuff directly into the runtime 
engine so that it happens automatically when an appropriately-marked C# class 
is loaded.  The CVM coder would be able to cache class pointers and method 
selectors, making the binding more efficient.  But that will have to wait 
until after I rearrange PInvoke following DotGNU 0.1.

I hope this helps get you started.  With any luck, you can simply write a 
conversion program that spits out C# definitions, without needing to wrap 
very much by hand in C.

Cheers,

Rhys.