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by nglevin 4776 days ago
As I recall, BridgeSupport created indexes to C symbols, enumerations and functions by producing XML files [1] that corresponded to C APIs like CoreGraphics, and code you produced yourself.

You don't necessarily need BridgeSupport to call out to Objective-C.

Speaking of BridgeSupport, does anybody know where the most recent source code for that project went? It seems to have been removed from Apple's Mac OS Forge after Laurent Sansonetti left Apple. A shame.

[1] - For example, http://merbist.com/2011/02/19/bridgesupport-build/ . The chapter referenced from O'Reilly's excellent MacRuby book does a better job of explaining the whole process.
1 comments
dottrap 4776 days ago
BridgeSupport also supplies .dylibs containing inline functions/macros that don't have symbols/linkage in the main framework.

While it is possible to workaround the lack of BridgeSupport, if Apple doesn't supply it, most developers are not going to go through the effort of using it. And if Apple doesn't supply it on iOS, they aren't going to make life nice for developers doing this (continue bans on dynamic libraries for loading the .dylib containing missing symbols, on mprotect which is horribly useful for things like subclassing and block generation and JIT).

I don't know where the source went. I'm sad to hear that. If you find a copy, let me know.

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nglevin 4776 days ago
You may be in luck, sir or ma'am. It looks like the one man army behind Mobiruby found a copy;

https://github.com/mobiruby/BridgeSupport

Which he found from a really neat looking archive for popular open source projects, at that. Bookmarking.

http://code.metager.de/source/

Just made a few fixes to get the BridgeSupport framework to compile on 10.8. Might issue a pull request.

link