A new development version of the BridgeSupport project, now based on the clang/LLVM compiler framework, is available for testing!

You can grab it from here.

If you intend to use it from MacRuby, you will have to install MacRuby 0.7.1, a minor release containing support for this new BridgeSupport, which can be found here.

What is BridgeSupport?

BridgeSupport files are XML files that describe the API symbols of frameworks or libraries that cannot be introspected at runtime. These are generally ANSI C symbols that are non-object-oriented items such as constants, enumerations, structures, and functions but can also include some additional information about classes, methods, and informal protocols.

BridgeSupport files are a major component of the Objective-C bridges (RubyCocoa, PyObjC) and languages (MacRuby) which permit Cocoa development.

BridgeSupport also comes with a command-line utility, called gen_bridge_metadata, which allows you to generate BridgeSupport files for 3rd party frameworks or libraries.

BridgeSupport is a technology included in Mac OS X since version 10.5, Leopard.

What is new?

In this preview release, the BridgeSupport metadata generator has been rewritten on top of the clang/LLVM compiler framework. It now generates more accurate metadata from header files, and it performs significantly faster and is more stable.

It also annotates new API constructs such as C-level blocks.

Additionally, all system frameworks are now covered by BridgeSupport. Prior to this release, only selected public frameworks were covered.

Help!

Please help us identifying possible problems by installing this preview release and resuming the development of your MacRuby application. You can also now access APIs dealing with C-level blocks, which wasn’t possible before.

Give it a try and let us know if you find any problem.