Plan for higher-level bindings?

[ubolonton]

By "high level", I mean:

• Fewer places in user code where unsafe is necessary.
• Improved ergonomics, e.g. seamless conversion between basic types, block <-> closure, exception <-> Result.

Do you think they belong to this crate? Or maybe it's the job of bindgen and the layers above?

I also found several related efforts:

• objrs.
• RustKit (referenced by core-foundation-rs).
• bindgen's objc support, which uses this crate.

How do you think their approaches compare to this? Can we combine the efforts somehow?

[madsmtm]

Fewer places in user code where unsafe is necessary.

Improved ergonomics, e.g. seamless conversion between basic types

msg_send! and such cannot be made safe, because we cannot verify that the selector's arguments are correct.

But other crates like objc-foundation goes some of the way of implementing safe abstractions on Foundation types (fruity also deserves a mention here).

block <-> closure

block exists and can currently safely provide the closure -> block part, and maybe in the future block -> closure.

exception <-> Result

There exists objc_exception, but it actually causes UB until the ffi-unwind project group progresses further.

Can we combine the efforts somehow

• objrs takes a completely different approach (we use the dynamic API, they declaratively / statically create classes), but the ideas might get integrated into this project at some point when they're more stable.
• I think RustKit is dead?
• bindgen might be a viable approach for some of the ergonomics, hadn't considered that before, thanks for the link!