Re: [Liberty-eiffel] Fwd: GNUstep toolkit for Liberty

[Germán Arias]

Hi

On 2014-09-07 13:56:37 -0600 Paolo Redaelli <address@hidden> wrote:

> It can be done since it is possible to sen messages to Objective C
> objects  from a "pure" C/C++ program.
> In fact Eiffel is currently transcompiled to C, using C as a "portable
> assembler".

I know, I was seeing the possibility to call ObjC methods directly, to not use 
intermediate c functions.

> For the little I know of Objective C I shall admit that it is quite a
> "strange" request, yet it has already been made several times, according to
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20419042/pure-c-function-calling-objective-c-method
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1280017/how-to-call-an-objective-c-method-from-a-c-method
> 
> and many others.
> A universal solution would be using objc_msgSend  (
> https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/DOCUMENTATION/Cocoa/Conceptual/ObjCRuntimeGuide/Articles/ocrtHowMessagingWorks.html
> ) but it is a variadic call.
> Variadic calls are usually tricky to correctly wrap in Eiffel since it
> is a strongly typed language.
> 
> Fear not, I'll dig the issue.
> Have you considered Gtk or Qt?
> Cheers
> 

The problem I see with GTK is the constant changes in the API. I don't know if 
the GTK people will decide make big changes in next versions. And definitely I 
don't have the intention (and the time) to maintain a library that needs take 
care about different versions of the API.

Qt? I don't know C++

Fox Toolkit is simple and the API is stable, the same with GNUstep. I'm just 
seeing the most easy way to do this, since my free time is limited.

Germán