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Getting Started With Objective Sharpie

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Important

Objective Sharpie is a tool for experienced Xamarin developers with advanced knowledge of Objective-C (and by extension, C). Before attempting to bind an Objective-C library you should have solid knowledge of how to build the native library on the command line (and a good understanding of how the native library works).

Installing Objective Sharpie

Objective Sharpie is currently a standalone command line tool for Mac OS X 10.10 and newer, and is not a fully supported Xamarin product. It should only be used by advanced developers to assist in creating a binding project to a 3rd party Objective-C library.

Objective Sharpie can be downloaded as a standard OS X package installer. Run the installer and follow all of the on-screen prompts from the installation wizard:

Tip

Use the sharpie update command to update to the latest version.

Basic Walkthrough

Objective Sharpie is a command line tool provided by Xamarin that assists in creating the definitions required to bind a 3rd party Objective-C library to C#. Even when using Objective Sharpie, the developer will need to modify the generated files after Objective Sharpie finishes to address any issues that could not be automatically handled by the tool.

Where possible, Objective Sharpie will annotate APIs with which it has some doubt on how to properly bind (many constructs in the native code are ambiguous). These annotations will appear as [Verify] attributes.

The output of Objective Sharpie is a pair of files - ApiDefinition.cs and StructsAndEnums.cs - that can be used to create a binding project which compiles into a library you can use in Xamarin apps.

Important

Objective Sharpie comes with one major rule for proper usage: you must absolutely pass it the correct clang compiler command line arguments in order to ensure proper parsing. This is because the Objective Sharpie parsing phase is simply a tool implemented against the clang libtooling API.

This means that Objective Sharpie has the full power of Clang (the C/Objective-C/C++ compiler that actually compiles the native library you would bind) and all of its internal knowledge of the header files for binding. Instead of translating the parsed AST to object code, Objective Sharpie translates the AST to a C# binding "scaffold" suitable for input to the bmac and btouch Xamarin binding tools.

If Objective Sharpie errors out during parsing, it means that clang errored out during its parsing phase trying to construct the AST, and you need to figure out why.

NEW! version 3.0 attempts address some of this complexity by supporting Xcode projects directly. If a native library has a valid Xcode project, Objective Sharpie can evaluate the project for a specified target and configuration to deduce the necessary input header files and compiler flags.

If no Xcode project is available, you will need to be more familiar with the project by deducing the correct input header files, header file search paths, and other necessary compiler flags. It is important to realize that the compiler flags used to build the native library are the same that must be passed to Objective Sharpie. This is a more manual process, and one that does require a bit of familiarity with compiling native code on the command line with the Clang toolchain.