macschema VS macdriver

With the macschema toolchain, you can generate API schemas about any Apple framework, class, function, etc based on their documentation and header declarations. This is useful for us in generating framework bindings in macdriver, but it would be useful for any project doing similar work, such as bindings for other languages. This sort of approach will play a big part in how Tractor will integrate with "whatever we want" down the line.

If this is interesting, take a look at the tool I built, macschema, which is open source on GitHub. Right now it's just the toolchain, but in theory we could generate schemas for all of Apple's APIs and put them in a repo in such a way that can be updated by a combination of macschema and user contributed patches. I'll let somebody else do that though.

The first big release of the year was the macdriver project, which got a significant response on Hacker News. It gives us Objective-C and Apple framework bindings for Go, letting you build simple Apple apps entirely from Go. That wasn't possible before, so it was a little exciting, but it was early. The native Go APIs included for commonly used Foundation and Cocoa classes were far from complete. They could still be used if you knew what you were doing, but with an ideal of total coverage of Apple frameworks, that wouldn't be enough. There were also unresolved issues just deciding how to best manage memory and pointers, which I knew would fall on me to figure out and take some time.

Even less common are schemas for non-web APIs. In 2016, Electron started releasing a JSON schema of all their APIs that allowed me to build a bridge to use Electron APIs from Go. I had that prototype in mind when I started the macdriver project that was released a couple months ago. Right now we're manually wrapping Apple framework classes with Go types so you can write native Apple platform applications that look like this:

It started as a demo for macdriver, but over the last week or so I've been making a standalone version. 90% of that time was playing around with it while trying to make demos.

Done https://github.com/progrium/macdriver/issues/12