Re: Thinking (again) about an Objective-C bridge

Ideally, what you want is:

- grab the symbols for the method and additional argument names
- convert to strings and concatenate
- create a global variable with that name (prefixed) to hold the selector
value.
- add the var and string to a hash table (or generate code) to look up the
selector value at program startup

I don't think there's anything there that Dylan macros can't do.


On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 3:07 PM, Bruce Mitchener
<[email protected]>wrote:

> One of the issues to solve in doing an Objective-C bridge for Dylan is how
> to represent a method invocation on the Dylan side.
>
> In C, we have %call-c-function, which looks like:
>
>     %call-c-function (?name:expression, #key ?c-modifiers:expression = "")
>         (?parameters:*) => (?results:*)
>       (?arguments:*)
>     end;
>
> In LispWorks, they use this sort of syntax:
>
>     (invoke window "close")
>     (invoke box "setWidth:height:" 10 20)
>
> In ClozureCL, this is the syntax:
>
>     (send w :set-alpha-value 0.5)
>     (send v :mouse p :in-rect r)
>
> In Python:
>
>     anObject.modifyArg_andAnother_(arg1, arg2)
>
> Overall, I like the approach used by ClozureCL as it seems much more
> natural and more like the Objective-C that one would see. They've also got
> variants of sending to the superclass, sending when a structure is
> returned, etc.  Having the keywords and the arguments alternate makes it
> nicely readable (much more so than the LispWorks example).
>
> In ClozureCL, a lot of the work is done by macros, but I don't think our
> macros in Dylan are powerful enough to do the same work. So what can we get
> away with? We don't want a lot of work being done at run-time as we'd like
> for this to be as efficient as possible.
>
> My thinking is that we might need a custom converter, much like
> %call-c-function has, with the corresponding compiler support.  I'd love to
> be proved wrong though, so what thoughts do any of you have on this?
>
>  - Bruce
>
>
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