Foundation and UIKit

[tobiasplaten]

Hi There
Cocotron provides an Implementation of Foundation and CoreGraphics
I will soon begin to implement UIKit on top of Cocotrons CoreGraphics
The Objective C Runtime will be Apples version From Snow Leopard or
Cocotrons version.

[Philippe Hausler]

The runtime is closer to the GNU version of the runtime at the current moment, however I do plan to modify the runtime to be closer to the Apple Obj-C runtime.

I definitely give props to the Cocotron project for creating a similar project for windows, however there are some key issues that make that port cagey at best when it comes to Android.

First the major problem is UI consistency. Android only allows UI creation via the java interfaces (or via JNI), creation of user interface elements could be done if you re-built all of the interface elements from scratch via draw calls like the OpenGL used for Android NDK libraries. You still will run into the issue that the application cannot be launched from the visual part of the operating system, it has to have at the bare min a Java wrapper to house the application as a JNI implementation. 

The second major issue is that as good of an effort that the Cocotron project has done, they have skipped over some of the lower level functionality of the api's and implemented accessibility to Core Foundation style functions via an abstraction back up into the cocoa frameworks: this is fairly intense and probably should be the other direction CoreFoundation builds Foundation just like the Apple frameworks. Toll free bridging brings this to be a bit more visible.

I have the CFLite (Apple's open source version of CoreFoundation) nearly working. With a bit of minor changes and some other libraries I am sure it can work as a real CoreFoundation. And thusly being able to do things like handling strings properly, toll-free bridging etc...

If you take a look at my http://builditwith.me/idea/0ItC page, I am looking to build not only the compiler but also a full-flegeded solution for a 100% code-compatable environment complete with integration into Xcode. If you would like to help out with this I would like to explore that.

Sincerely,

Philippe Hausler