How to create Cocoa objects in C++?

Question

Is it possible and how to create objects of such classes like NSString from C++ code?

Chris Devereux · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-20 14:30:35Z

2

You've got 3 options:

1) If you're mainly writing in C++ and want to communicate with an API that expects cocoa strings and collections, then Core Foundation is a C (and therefore C++) api for creating and interacting with many of Foundation's classes. Many NS-prefixed cocoa classes have a CF-prefixed equivalent, and can be used interchangeably.

2) If you're integrating c++ code with objective-c code, then you have the option of compiling the interface classes as objective-c++ which allows you to mix both in the same source file. So it's valid to do stuff like vector.push_back( [NSString stringWithFormat:@"string"] )

3) It is possible to access (near enough) the whole objective-c language as a C runtime library by including <objc/runtime.h>. I can't actually think of a good reason for using this over one of the other 2, but it might be worth keeping in mind if there's a good reason you can't.

answered Mar 20, 2012 at 14:30

Chris Devereux

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2 Comments

Dmitriy Over a year ago

thanks, can you please tell about #2, how do I compile files as objective-c++?

geowar Over a year ago

The simple solution is to change your source files extension to .mm; slightly less drastic is to select your C++ source file in Xcode and change it's compiler option to ObjC++ (via the inspector)

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