Re: [Chicken-users] Objective-C interface (sort of...)

[Thomas Chust]

Am 24.11.2005, 07:42 Uhr, schrieb felix winkelmann <address@hidden>:

> [...]
> I've started trying to come up with an Objective-C interface, attached
> my current efforts. Still highly experimental and incomplete.
> Comments are welcome, patches and extensions even more.
> Defining ObjC classes inside Scheme (or Proxy objects to be
> more specific) should be possible, but I'm still pondering how
> to create a NSMethodSignature instance from the forwarded
> selector only...
> [...]

Hello,

some weeks ago, I had set out to do ObjC wrappers (for Apple's runtime) as
well, but didn't finish them to my satisfaction. Nevertheless I have some
(hopefully useful) remarks:
  * One could get rid of the lazy-ffi dependency (which is currently pre-
    venting me from testing the egg) by using the objc_msgSendv family of
    functions instead of the objc_msgSend family
  * To create an NSMethodSignature you should be able to just use the
    - (NSMethodSignature *)methodSignatureForSelector:(SEL)aSelector
    or
    + (NSMethodSignature  
*)instanceMethodSignatureForSelector:(SEL)aSelector
    methods provided by the NSObject class.
  * When I tried to create new ObjC classes from Scheme, which is really
    necessary when you want to do any useful GUI Programming for example,
    I ran into big trouble as the ObjC runtime functions apparently do
    *not* behave as documented in that area. For example, the supplied
    usage examples in the Apple Documentation do not work at all. Looking
    around on the net, I found out, that the PyObjC developers have been
    complaining about the same problem. At that point I decided to give up
    the project for lack of time to reverse engineer Apples runtime and to
    study PyObjC's guts.

cu,
Thomas