Objective C Bridge

There is the start of an Objective-C bridge available.

Some sources of information about the Objective-C run-time and other bridges to it:

• Understanding the Objective-C Runtime
• Objective-C Runtime Programming Guide
• Objective-C Runtime Reference
• Clozure CL's Objective-C Bridge

BridgeSupport

We should be able to parse BridgeSupport files and generate bindings for the Apple frameworks.

Data Structure Bridging

We need a way to bridge Objective C and Core Foundation types such as NSString, NSArray, NSDictionary with their Dylan equivalents, or at least to provide simple ways to access them.

Optimizing to use objc_msgSend_vtable

We will need compiler support to do this correctly, but some invocations of objc_msgSend could, in fact, become invocations of the objc_msgSend_vtable* functions. The code generated should actually be using objc_msgSend_fixup in this situation to enable this optimization within the Objective C run-time.

For details, see [objc-explain]: objc_msgSend_vtable by Greg Parker.