Hi,
I've been working on a secret Clang-based project for a while, and now I'm ready to share it with the world.
Introducing the "Deobjectivizer".
This is a program that scans framework bundle headers for Objective-C constructs, and generates procedural C wrappers around them, so you can call them from C. It uses Clang's libraries to parse, analyze, and rewrite Objective-C headers into pure C headers, and then generate corresponding source files containing the wrapper implementations. The implementation of this tool is a little hackish at the moment, but it suffices to generate a wrapper around the entire Foundation framework (at least).
With this, we don't have to use Objective-C just to use Cocoa anymore. The Mac OS X Quartz driver can go forward now! The QuickTime decoder can use QTKit now instead of the 32-bit only Carbon QuickTime interface, allowing it to work on 64-bit (if and when Wine supports it on Mac). It might even be possible to integrate Win32 screen-savers with Mac OS X using this (the ScreenSaver framework is Objective-C based).
I've attached the source so you can play with my newest creation. At the moment, it can only be built on Mac OS X (only one of two platforms, the other being iOS, where a program like this makes sense anyway). Feel free to make changes; the sources are licensed under the same license as Clang itself. We can't incorporate it into Wine directly because it is written in C++ (and maybe because of the license), but we can detect its presence at compile time (in configure) and use it to generate pure C wrappers that Wine can use.
Comments welcome. What do you think?
Chip