Objective-C in Rust

See objc2 for top-level documentation, including the documentation on framework crates.

Also check out block2 and dispatch2.

Contact

Always feel free to open an issue on GitHub if you find a problem or have any questions.

If you prefer to have a more synchronous and less "formal" discussion, there is a Matrix workspace, feel free to ask any questions in the "Users" room.

Also see CONTRIBUTING.md if you would like to help out.

License

The licensing of the project is a bit complicated, see LICENSE.md for details.

Acknowledgements / Prior art

This repository is a merge of the following projects, see reasoning for the fork here:

• objc, renamed to objc2.
• objc-encode, renamed to objc2-encode.
• objc_exception, moved to objc2::exception.
• objc_id, moved to objc2::rc.
• objc-foundation, renamed to objc2-foundation.
• block, renamed to block2.

These were created almost solely by @SSheldon, so a huge thanks for their fantastic work on these crates!

Additionally, the dispatch2 crate originally lived here.

This project also draws inspiration from:

• apple-sys
• cacao
• the core-foundation-rs project
• fruity
• metal
• objrs
• objr and family
• rust-macios
• uikit-sys and @simlay's Objective-C work on bindgen
• cidre
• the apple-media project
• dispatch
• apple-rs

Finally, this is by far not the only project that ever tried to interoperate with Objective-C; other languages have done so as well (to varying degrees of success):

• Swift: Built from the beginning for Objective-C interop, and is what objc2 aspires to have feature-parity with (though will probably never reach). Truly beautifully designed language!
• C#: Xamarin, Xamarin.Mac, a good source of inspiration for what "should" work.
• Python: PyObjC (previously?) official Apple project that worked with "BridgeSupport", nowadays they also generate metadata by invoking Clang. Others include objp and rubicon.objc
• Ruby: MacRuby, RubyCocoa
• Dart: ffigen
• Kotlin: somewhat built-in support
• Nim: somewhat built-in support, darwin, objc
• D: somewhat built-in support, derelict
• Java: Java-Objective-C-Bridge, Multi-OS Engine: Nat/J (also has a generator), Apple also has a very old official project.
• Node.js: NodObjC, objc
• Zig: zig-objcrt
• V: Not really existing, they just write and compile Objective-C code, and use manual C-bindings.
• Go: MacDriver