Question

Is it possible to programmatically get the properties of an object in objective-c without using the runtime methods? I only ask because it seems unnecessary to check it at runtime, when it won’t be changing.
I’m thinking of something to this effect:

MyObject *foo = [[MyObject alloc] init];
NSDictionary *propertiesNamesAndValues = [foo getAllProperties];

Currently my solution looks like this:

id currentClass = [MyObject class];
NSString *propertyName;
unsigned int outCount, i;
objc_property_t *properties = class_copyPropertyList(currentClass, &outCount);
for (i = 0; i < outCount; i++) 
{
    objc_property_t property = properties[i];
    propertyName = [NSString stringWithCString:property_getName(property)];
    NSLog(propertyName);
    NSLog(@"%@",[foo valueForKey:propertyName]);
} 

Answer 1

Simple answer is no.

Introspection by definition happens at runtime.
Additionally, objective-c is highly dynamic language deferring virtually everything to runtime.

In Objective-C, you just don’t have that much syntactic sugar for introspection – you just have plain-C runtime functions.

However, nothing stops you from writing some categories on NSObject to provide more Objective-C’ish API and I guess there must be some open source implementations already over internet.