Objective-C from OCaml

Manipulate and introspect Objective-C from OCaml!

Right now this is using a high level interface provided by DLIntrospection.

I made this because its a lot easier to play with Objective-C, investigate it from a repl, use utop, than the compile cycle, motivated in part by my iOS reverse engineering work.

Installation

Install with opam, the OCaml package manager! Get a crash course on OCaml, opam here

$ opam install objc

or you get a latest version directly from the git repo:

$ opam pin add objc git@github.com:fxfactorial/ocaml-objc.git

Usage

Look at example/e.ml for an example of the high level Introspect module. Empty lists mean that the Objective-C side didn't know about the class in question.

let () =
  ObjC.Introspect.properties "NSString"
  |> List.iter print_endline;

  match ObjC.Introspect.protocols "NonExistent" with
  | [] -> print_endline "Doesn't exist so empty list"
  | l -> l |> List.iter print_endline

Also exposes some parts of the dyld API, the OSX, iOS linker.

with utop, you can do:

#require "objc";;
let imgs = ObjC.Dyld.images ();;
al imgs : string list =
["/Users/Edgar/.opam/objc/bin/ocamlrun"; "/usr/lib/libncurses.5.4.dylib";
 "/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib"; "/usr/lib/system/libcache.dylib";
 "/usr/lib/system/libcommonCrypto.dylib";
 "/usr/lib/system/libcompiler_rt.dylib"; 
 "/usr/lib/system/libcopyfile.dylib";
 ...

let props = ObjC.Introspect.properties "NSString";;
val props : string list = 
["@property (atomic, assign, readonly) Q length"; 
"@property (atomic, copy, readonly) NSString* stringByRemovingPercentEncoding"]

Or if you feel like compiling (use ocamlc or ocamlopt):

$ ocamlfind ocamlc -package objc e.ml -linkpkg -o T