Vision

[Jacob Carlborg via Digitalmars-d]

On 2015-10-23 14:44, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:

> As an objective C developer on iOS, I am curious if you have done any
> true development using this?

No :). But I have done some development even without this, i.e. only 
using the Objective-C runtime. Even though this might look small, it's a 
huge improvement. I mean, you don't have to worry about the ABI.

> The example looks terrible -- objc_lookUpClass which only gets a class
> that can alloc an NSString? Can this be done better? An objective-c
> developer that is not too familiar with D would be very disappointed in
> this binding.

This is only the first step, the bare minimum that is useful. I had a 
pull request which implement support for most of the Objective-C 
features but was asked to split it up in smaller chunks. Remember that 
the initial C++ support was even more lacking than this. It was not 
possible to instantiate C++ classes from D.

This is the goal [1].

I'm pretty sure that it's possible to use some of the D features to 
improve this.

> Also, what type does 'id' map to?

"id" in Objective-C is a bit weird since you can store both all object 
types an also all regular C types. There is no type in D that 
corresponds to that.

When working with the Objective-C runtime it is something like this:

alias Class = objc_class*

struct objc_class
{
     Class isa;
}

alias id = objc_object*;

struct objc_object
{
     Class isa;
}

[1] http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP43

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg