Objective C for Windows

Question

What would be the best way to write Objective-C on the Windows platform?

Cygwin and gcc? Is there a way I can somehow integrate this into Visual Studio?

Along those lines - are there any suggestions as to how to link in and use the Windows SDK for something like this. Its a different beast but I know I can write assembly and link in the Windows DLLs giving me accessibility to those calls but I don't know how to do this without googling and getting piecemeal directions.

Is anyone aware of a good online or book resource to do or explain these kinds of things?

Answer 1

I have mixed feelings about the Cocotron project. I'm glad they are releasing source code and sharing but I don't feel that they are doing things the easiest way.

Examples.
Apple has released the source code to the objective-c runtime, which includes properties and garbage collection. The Cocotron project however has their own implementation of the objective-c runtime. Why bother to duplicate the effort? There is even a Visual Studio Project file that can be used to build an objc.dll file. Or if you're really lazy, you can just copy the DLL file from an installation of Safari on Windows.

They also did not bother to leverage CoreFoundation, which is also open sourced by Apple. I posted a question about this but did not receive an answer.

I think the current best solution is to take source code from multiple sources (Apple, CocoTron, GnuStep) and merge it together to what you need. You'll have to read a lot of source but it will be worth the end result.

Answer 2

First of all, forget about GNUStep tools. Neither ProjectManager nor ProjectCenter can be called an IDE. With all due respect, it looks like guys from GNUStep project are stuck in the late 80-s (which is when NeXTSTEP first appeared).

Vim

ctags support Objective-C since r771 (be sure to pick the pre-release 5.9 version and add --langmap=ObjectiveC:.m.h to the command line, see here), so you'll have decent code completion/tag navigation.

Here's a short howto on adding Objective-C support to Vim tagbar plugin.

Emacs

The same applies to etags shipped with modern Emacsen, so you can start with Emacs Objective C Mode. YASnippet will provide useful templates:

and if you want something more intelligent than the basic tags-based code completion, take a look at this question.

Eclipse

CDT supports Makefile-based projects:

-- so technically you can build your Objective-C projects out of the box (on Windows, you'll need the Cygwin or MinGW toolchain). The only problem is the code editor which will report plenty of errors against what it thinks is a pure C code (on-the-fly code checking can be turned off, but still...). If you want proper syntax highlighting, you can add Eclim to your Eclipse and enjoy all the good features of both Eclipse and Vim (see above).

Another promising Eclipse plugin is Colorer, but it doesn't support Objective-C as of yet. Feel free to file a feature request though.

SlickEdit

SlickEdit, among other features of a great IDE, does support Objective-C. While it is fairly complex to learn (not as complex as Emacs though), I believe this is your best option provided you don't mind purchasing it (the price is quite affordable).

Additionally, it has an Eclipse plugin which can be used as an alternative to the stand-alone editor.

KDevelop

Rumor has it there exists a KDevelop patch (15 year old, but who cares?). I personally don't think KDevelop is feature-superior compared to Emacsen, so I wouldn't bother trying it.

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The above also applies to Objective-C development on Linux, since all of the tools mentioned are more or less portable.

Answer 3

Expanding on the two previous answers, if you just want Objective-C but not any of the Cocoa frameworks, then gcc will work on any platform. You can use it through Cygwin or get MinGW. However, if you want the Cocoa frameworks, or at least a reasonable subset of them, then GNUStep and Cocotron are your best bets.

Cocotron implements a lot of stuff that GNUStep does not, such as CoreGraphics and CoreData, though I can't vouch for how complete their implementation is on a specific framework. Their aim is to keep Cocotron up to date with the latest version of OS X so that any viable OS X program can run on Windows. Because GNUStep typically uses the latest version of gcc, they also add in support for Objective-C++ and a lot of the Objective-C 2.0 features.

I haven't tested those features with GNUStep, but if you use a sufficiently new version of gcc, you might be able to use them. I was not able to use Objective-C++ with GNUStep a few years ago. However, GNUStep does compile from just about any platform. Cocotron is a very mac-centric project. Although it is probably possible to compile it on other platforms, it comes XCode project files, not makefiles, so you can only compile its frameworks out of the box on OS X. It also comes with instructions on compiling Windows apps on XCode, but not any other platform. Basically, it's probably possible to set up a Windows development environment for Cocotron, but it's not as easy as setting one up for GNUStep, and you'll be on your own, so GNUStep is definitely the way to go if you're developing on Windows as opposed to just for Windows.

For what it's worth, Cocotron is licensed under the MIT license, and GNUStep is licensed under the LGPL.

Answer 4

Check out WinObjC:

https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC

It's an official, open-source project by Microsoft that integrates with Visual Studio + Windows.

Answer 5

If you just want to experiment, there's an Objective-C compiler for .NET (Windows) here: qckapp

Answer 6

You can get an objective c compiler that will work with Windows and play nice with Visual Studio 2008\2010 here.

open-c flite

Just download the latest source. You don't need to build all of CF-Lite there is a solution called objc.sln. You will need to fix a few of the include paths but then it will build just fine. There is even a test project included so you can see some objective-c .m files being compiled and working in visual studio. One sad thing is it only works with Win32 not x64. There is some assembly code that would need to be written for x64 for it to support that.