On Feb 5, 2004, at 3:43 PM, Marcel Weiher wrote:

>
> On 5 Feb 2004, at 19:38, Avi Bryant wrote:
>>
>> But, really, we should just do a decent ObjC bridge one of these 
>> days...
>
> If there is actual interest, I'd be happy to restart work on that...
>
> What do you find indecent about the current one?
>
> It really isn't all that pretty, but tends to do everything you can 
> easily do without overcoming Squeak's not being re-entrant.

I'm definitely interested... in fact I'm sitting here right now with 
VMMaker open thinking about starting to work on one.
The main things I don't like about the current one:
- it doesn't seem to work with recent VMs.  This is probably easily 
fixed, but it would be a good start to have a prebuilt 3.6 VM with a 
working ObjectiveCPlugin.
- it doesn't allow message sends from ObjC to Squeak objects.  This is 
what you're talking about with "not re-entrant", but to me that's a 
very necessary part (the only point to me of an ObjC bridge is to build 
Cocoa UIs, and that requires being able to get callbacks and delegation 
messages AFAIK).  This will require some thread and semaphore stuff, 
but it's certainly doable.

Also nice would be compatibility methods for easy bridging between 
String/NSString, Array/NSArray, OrderedCollection/NSMutableArray, 
Dictionary/NSMutableDictionary, etc.

Cheers,
Avi