Drew's fast Rust AppKit bindings

Provides select Rust bindings for Apple AppKit framework. This may be compared to,

• appkit crate
• cacao
• objrs_framework_appkit
• fruitbasket

Part of the objr expanded universe, distinctive features of this library:

• As part of the objr ecosystem, classes such as NSView can be subclassed directly in Rust.
• Fast. This crate is significantly faster than other approaches. If you are interested in writing performance-critical realtime applications, this is the solution for you.
  • The full set of optimization is far too many to list, but the big idea is to either do what native ObjC/Swift applications do, or do something faster.
  • Compile-time selectors. Most Rust crates do a runtime lookup for ObjC methods, which involves acquiring a lock and other yucky stuff, either on the first call or every call. Instead, we do what real ObjC compilers do, which is way faster. For more details, see objr
  • Smart pointers that provide global ARC inference. Like ARC, you don't need to write manual retain/release calls. Unlike ARC, the compiler usually doesn't need to write them either, meaning lower runtime memory management cost than even native code. For more details, see objr.
  • Runtime autorelease eliding, which keeps your objects out of autoreleasepools in common cases. For more details, see objr.
  • Pointer packing for optional types so they fit in a u64. For more details, see objr
• Safe APIs. Where possible APIs are designed with safe abstractions to provide familiar guarantees to Rust developers
• Low-level. These bindings assume familiarity with bound APIs and are not documented separately. For details on how they work, see the native documentation.
• Free for noncommercial or "small commercial" use.

Implementation status

The following APIs are at least partially implemented. These implementations are incomplete but contain common functions or "the ones I use".

The objr macro system makes it very ergonomic to add new bindings for specific missing features or new APIs.

• NSView - several common APIs. In particular, subclassing of this type is fairly well tested in my other projects.
• NSWindow and related types - several common APIs.
• NSApplication - a few APIs
• NSScreen - a few APIs
• NSGraphics, NSBackingStoreType, NSDeviceDescriptionKey, NSGraphicsContext - few APIs
• NSEvent - keyCode
• NSAccessibility - common APIs.
• NSFont,NSFontDescriptor - a few APIs.
• NSStringDrawing
• NSImage - a few APIs
• NSBitmapImageRep
• NSColor