Objective-C and runtime type inspection

[Joel Reymont]

On Aug 17, 2006, at 8:14 PM, Bob Ippolito wrote:

> 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.

Pain in the rear, yes. So long as one can build a varags list by hand  
in C (I think you can)  it would still be manageable, though. You  
would just give objc_msgSend the object, the selector and then the  
varargs list built from the arguments list.

> 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 guess it would be up to the programmer to make sure that proper  
arguments are given. I figure I can pass structures as binaries and  
pointers as ints.

> 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.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm thinking about. I also want to make the  
Obj-C runtime a driver as opposed to a C-node. I don't want the  
networking overhead but I'm easily swayed.

> 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.

Yes, I'll release them under the Erlang license. With everyone  
reviewing the code and trying out it will go much faster.

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