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

User · Answer

Check out WinObjC   https   github com Microsoft WinObjC  It s an official  open-source project by Microsoft that integrates with Visual Studio   Windows

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Also      The Cocotron is an open source project which aims to implement a cross-platform Objective-C API similar to that described by Apple Inc  s Cocoa documentation  This includes the AppKit  Foundation  Objective-C runtime and support APIs such as CoreGraphics and CoreFoundation    http   www cocotron org

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If you are comfortable with Visual Studio environment    Small project  jGRASP with gcc Large project  Cocotron   I heard there are emulators  but I could find only Apple II Emulator http   virtualapple org   It looks like limited to games

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WinObjC  Windows Bridge for iOS  previously known as    Project Islandwood        Windows Bridge for iOS  also referred to as WinObjC  is a Microsoft open source project that provides an Objective-C development environment for Visual Studio Windows  In addition  WinObjC provides support for iOS API compatibility  While the final release will happen later this fall  allowing the bridge to take advantage of new tooling capabilities that will ship with the upcoming Visual Studio 2015 Update    The bridge is available to the open-source community now in its current state  Between now and the fall  The iOS bridge as an open-source project under the MIT license  Given the ambition of the project  making it easy for iOS developers to build and run apps on Windows    Salmaan Ahmed has an in-depth post on the Windows Bridge for iOS http   blogs windows com buildingapps 2015 08 06 windows-bridge-for-ios-lets-open-this-up  discussing the compiler  runtime  IDE integration  and what the bridge is and isn   t  Best of all  the source code for the iOS bridge is live on GitHub right now    The iOS bridge supports both Windows 8 1 and Windows 10 apps built for x86 and x64 processor architectures  and soon we will add compiler optimizations and support for ARM  which adds mobile support

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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

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

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I m aware this is a very old post  but I have found a solution which has only become available more recently AND enables nearly all Objective-C 2 0 features on the Windows platform   With the advent of gcc 4 6  support for Objective-C 2 0 language features  blocks  dot syntax  synthesised properties  etc  was added to the Objective-C compiler  see the release notes for full details   Their runtime has also been updated to work almost identically to Apple s own Objective-C 2 0 runtime  In short this means that  almost  any program that will legitimately compile with Clang on a Mac will also compile with gcc 4 6 without modification   As a side-note  one feature that is not available is dictionary array etc literals as they are all hard-coded into Clang to use Apple s NSDictionary  NSArray  NSNumber  etc classes   However  if you are happy to live without Apple s extensive frameworks  you can  As noted in other answers  GNUStep and the Cocotron provide modified versions of Apple s class libraries  or you can write your own  my preferred option    MinGW is one way to get GCC 4 6 on the Windows platform  and can be downloaded from The MinGW website  Make sure when you install it you include the installation of C  C    Objective-C and Objective-C    While optional  I would also suggest installing the MSYS environment   Once installed  Objective-C 2 0 source can be compiled with   gcc MyFile m -lobjc -std c99 -fobjc-exceptions -fconstant-string-class clsname  etc  additional flags  see documentation   MinGW also includes support for compiling native GUI Windows applications with the -mwindows flag  For example   g   -mwindows MyFile cpp  I have not attempted it yet  but I imagine if you wrap your Objective-C classes in Objective-C   at the highest possible layer  you should be able to successfully intertwine native Windows GUI C   and Objective-C all in the one Windows Application

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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

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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

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If you just want to experiment  there s an Objective-C compiler for  NET  Windows  here  qckapp

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Get GNUStep here  Get MINGW here  Install MINGW  Install GNUStep  Then Test

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A recent attempt to port Objective C 2 0 to Windows is the Subjective project    From the Readme      Subjective is an attempt to bring Objective C 2 0 with ARC support to   Windows       This project is a fork of objc4-532 2  the Objective C runtime that   ships with OS X 10 8 5  The port can be cross-compiled on OS X using   llvm-clang combined with the MinGW linker       There are certain limitations many of which are a matter of extra   work  while others  such as exceptions and blocks  depend on more   serious work in 3rd party projects  The limitations are           32-bit only - 64-bit is underway          Static linking only - dynamic linking is underway          No closures blocks - until libdispatch supports them on Windows          No exceptions - until clang supports them on Windows          No old style GC - until someone cares             Internals  no vtables  no gdb support  just plain malloc  no   preoptimizations - some of these things will be available under the   64-bit build           Currently a patched clang compiler is required  the patch adds   -fobjc-runtime subj flag   The project is available on Github  and there is also a thread on the Cocotron Group outlining some of the progress and issues encountered

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You can use Objective C inside the Windows environment  If you follow these steps  it should be working just fine    Visit the GNUstep website and download GNUstep MSYS Subsystem  MSYS for GNUstep   GNUstep Core  Libraries for GNUstep   and GNUstep Devel After downloading these files  install in that order  or you will have problems with configuration Navigate to C  GNUstep GNUstep System Library Headers Foundation1 and ensure that Foundation h exists Open up a command prompt and run gcc -v to check that GNUstep MSYS is correctly installed  if you get a file not found error  ensure that the bin folder of GNUstep MSYS is in your PATH  Use this simple  Hello World  program to test GNUstep s functionality    include  lt Foundation Foundation h gt   int main void        NSAutoreleasePool   pool     NSAutoreleasePool alloc  init       NSLog   Hello World           pool drain    return     Go back to the command prompt and cd to where you saved the  Hello World  program and then compile it 2  gcc -o helloworld exe  lt HELLOWORLD gt  m -I  GNUstep GNUstep System Library Headers -L  GNUstep GNUstep System Library Libraries -std c99 -lobjc -lgnustep-base -fconstant-string-class NSConstantString  Finally  from the command prompt  type helloworld to run it   All the best  and have fun with Objective-C     NOTES    I used the default install path - adjust your command line accordingly Ensure the folder path of yours is similar to mine  otherwise you will get an error

[objective-c] Objective-C for Windows

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