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by OliverM 1653 days ago
So it’s not possible to interface with Metal or the Accelerate framework on macOS using pure C? I’ve found some outdated C wrappers for metal but nothing up to date, and wondered if something in the later versions assumed Swift or Objective C library consumption…
2 comments
flohofwoe 1652 days ago
Theoretically, Metal can be called from C by going directly through the Objective-C runtime API, but this requires either macro magic (like: https://github.com/garettbass/oc/), or code-generated headers (which was most likely used in the official Metal-cpp wrapper: https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/)

But it's not a big deal to move all the ObjC code into a separate .m source file and expose a smaller and higher level C API.

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comex 1652 days ago
Accelerate is a pure C API.

Metal is an Objective-C API. It is possible to call arbitrary Objective-C APIs from pure C using the Objective-C runtime functions, and Apple themselves recently released a Metal API wrapper written in C++ that works this way. [1] I wouldn't recommend that approach, though. With Objective-C being an almost-pure superset of C, it's a lot easier to just build your code in Objective-C mode and make native Objective-C calls where necessary.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29289761

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