Question

I have a small C++ application which I imported Objective-C classes. It works as Objective-C++ files, .mm, but any C++ file that includes a header which may end up including some Objective-C header must be renamed to a .mm extension for the proper GCC drivers.

Is there a way to write either a purely C++ wrapper for Objective-C classes or can I separate the Objective-C objects out somehow and just link them separately? Maybe even if the Objective-C classes became a small library I could statically re-link at compile time?

The problem is that this code is cross-platform, and it is more difficult to compile on systems that normally do not use Objective-C (i.e. not Macs). Even though preprocessor commands restrict any implementation of Objective-C code on Windows or Linux, the original code still has .mm extensions and GCC still treats the code as Objective-C++.

Answer 1

Usually you simply wrap your Objective-C classes with C++ classes by e.g. using opaque pointers and forwarding calls to C++ methods to Objective-C methods.

That way your portable C++ sources never have to see any Objective-C includes and ideally you only have to swap out the implementation files for the wrappers on different platforms.

Example:

// c++ header:
class Wrapper {
    struct Opaque;
    Opaque* opaque;
    // ...
public:
    void f();
};

// Objective-C++ source on Mac:
struct Wrapper::Opaque {
    id contained;
    // ...
};

void Wrapper::f() {
    [opaque->contained f];
}

// ...