D/Objective-C Bridge

[kris]

This sounds awesome!

Michel Fortin wrote:
> I've been working on creating a usable bridge between D and Objective-C 
> for some time and decided today it was working well enough for a first 
> release. The bridge is written entirely in D and attempts to provides a 
> mostly transparent environment in which Objective-C objects and classes 
> are accessible as regular D objects. You can freely send D objects to 
> Objective-C method calls and vice-versa, all 
> conversions/wrapping/encapsulation being done automatically for you with 
> some template-magic.
> 
> The goal is mostly to make it workable for writing Mac OS X applications 
> using Cocoa. The bridge allows D objects to be instantiated from nib 
> files, with outlets and actions being connected as any Cocoa programmer 
> would expect.
> 
> There are still a few round corners, missing thread-safty, performance 
> issues and possibly the lack of Intel support (I don't have an Intel Mac 
> to test). There is also much to be written: the bridge requires writing 
> a wrapper class for each class in the Cocoa framework we want to make 
> available. It's pretty easy thanks to all the templates, but it's still 
> time-consuming.
> 
> If you're interested, here is the project page (with a download link):
> 
> http://michelf.com/projects/d-objc-bridge/
> 
> I've also written an introduction article on my blog attempting to 
> explain how everything works without writing a book (it could be better 
> written):
> 
> http://michelf.com/2007/d-objc-bridge/
> 
> Things are not documented much right now, but I look forward to improve 
> that. The best documentation you can find currently about the internals 
> are the many comments in the code, although it's easy to get lost in all 
> these templates. The example application is pretty straightforward 
> though, and I'm pretty sure the bridge can be used easily without having 
> to understand much of how Objective-C works.
>