Objective-C and runtime type inspection

[Bob Ippolito]

On 8/17/06, Joel Reymont <joelr1@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> On Aug 17, 2006, at 7:37 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:
>
> > You'll still likely have problems with varargs and paired
> > arguments, e.g.
> > +[NSArray arrayWithObjects:...]
>
> I don't remember off hand how this case is handled but all functions
> have a definite type signature. Maybe the varargs go in as an array
> or something. I'll need to inspect NSArray.

PyObjC is by far the easiest way to poke at this stuff...

$ python
Python 2.4.3 (#1, Apr  7 2006, 10:54:33)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5250)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from Foundation import NSArray
>>> NSArray.arrayWithObjects_.signature
'@12@REDACTED:4@REDACTED'

varargs is not covered by type encodings, it looks like a single
object. You simply can't know that it's supposed to be nil terminated
varargs.

> > and +[NSArray arrayWithObjects:count:].
>
> This is an easy case because the selector (method name represented as
> a string) is exactly "arrayWithObjects:count:".

>>> NSArray.arrayWithObjects_count_.signature
'@16@REDACTED:4^@8I12'

Well, all you know its that it's an id pointer and an integer, not
that it's supposed to be an array of id plus exactly the length of
that array.

> I didn't think of it this way but I can try going totally dynamic. I
> could do RTTI the first time a selector is invoked and cache the info
> in a dict, gb_tree or ets table.

That's sort-of what we do in PyObjC. We do it for a whole class at a
time, but same idea.

> The whole point of importing or parsing headers is to generate
> functions whereas Erlang, just like Objective-C, works by message-
> passing.

Probably better off with just using atoms to represent selectors
instead of generating a million functions. Maybe something like:

msg(Self, Selector, [Args]) -> ...

Which is basically the same as objc_msgSend except using a list
instead of varargs.

I really do hope you choose to make the objc binding open source,
because if you don't someone else is going to have to duplicate the
work eventually.

-bob