On 2012-03-29 16:36:55 +0000, Jacob Carlborg <doob@me.com> said:

> 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/

All true.

The tricky thing with Objective-C is that you need to subclass Objective-C classes to make use of Cocoa. It's that mechanism that let you create a "D subclass" of a Objective-C class that is so heavyweight, and also not very efficient. Just calling Objective-C code is relatively easy in D if you don't need to subclass, but it won't take you very far.

> That's why Michel started the DMD fork to directly support binding to Objective-C classes and methods.

Indeed. And the approach makes much more sense. Only I don't really have time for compiler hacking these days. I still hope I'll be able to continue it later this year.


-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin@michelf.com
http://michelf.com/

On 2012-03-30 13:09, Michel Fortin wrote:
> Indeed. And the approach makes much more sense. Only I don't really have
> time for compiler hacking these days. I still hope I'll be able to
> continue it later this year.

I don't know if you have seen this, but I took the liberty to add your project as an idea for GSOC 2012:

http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?GSOC_2012_Ideas#Objective-Csupport

I hope it's Ok :)

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 2012-03-30 12:34:50 +0000, Jacob Carlborg <doob@me.com> said:

> On 2012-03-30 13:09, Michel Fortin wrote:
>> Indeed. And the approach makes much more sense. Only I don't really have
>> time for compiler hacking these days. I still hope I'll be able to
>> continue it later this year.
> 
> I don't know if you have seen this, but I took the liberty to add your project as an idea for GSOC 2012:
> 
> http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?GSOC_2012_Ideas#Objective-Csupport
> 
> I hope it's Ok :)

I had not seen this. Great idea!

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin@michelf.com
http://michelf.com/