PasCocoa: First thoughts

It may have been well over a year now but when I heard the news about someone making a Pascal Objective-C bridge (then with no name) I just ignored it for some reason. Maybe because 10.5 had not be released and there was no real reason for unless I wanted to make an Cocoa application. I should have taken notice at least so I could replace my WebKit code with native Pascal. As of 10.5 we now have the HICocoaView API which lets us use NSView classes in Carbon windows, which means: Cocoa is open game for me now. Even if I have to write the wrappers in Objective-C I can use them in Carbon.

A few weeks ago and I have compiled and ran some of the example projects (in PascalGladiator) and started some simple tests with NSTextView and NSOutline/TableView, 2 API’s which there Carbon equivalent is terrible and I spent hours trying to mimic the Cocoa version which has become the standard.

I was thrilled to see in not too long I had the 2 API’s working in a Carbon window and I can say they are designed much better then their Carbon counter parts. WASTE requires at least 1-2 weeks of full time work to get a good HIView wrapper but NSTextView was working I would argue better after just a few.

However there have been the PasCocoa bindings are incomplete and some basic features like overriding a method in an existing NSObject class is not available. Adding methods to Objective-C runtime for delegates/controllers is also a kludge. I plan to start making contributions to the project as well as adding macro support and code generation utilities in PascalGladiator to aid the process.

At any rate this is a great start and something I fully support as the future of Mac development using Pascal.