Creating a windowed application in pure C on MacOS

Question

I'm creating an application in pure C on Mac OSX. What I want is to create a window in which my app will be displayed.

Preferably I want it to be pure C solution, but if I have to use Objective-C class to initialize the window and then send a context to my C code then it will be fine.

I'm not using Xcode, only a simple text editor in with I tried to import Cocoa but it just generated a lot of errors.

How to write code in simple pure C code that will display a window in OSX?

Answer 1

You can use Objective-C runtime API example (iOS) Creating an iOS app in pure C

Alternative the same code in obj-c :

echo '#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>
int main ()
    {
        @autoreleasepool{
            [NSApplication sharedApplication];
            [NSApp setActivationPolicy:NSApplicationActivationPolicyRegular];
            id applicationName = [[NSProcessInfo processInfo] processName];
            id window = [[NSWindow alloc] initWithContentRect:NSMakeRect(0, 0, 120, 120)
                styleMask:NSTitledWindowMask backing:NSBackingStoreBuffered defer:NO];
            [window cascadeTopLeftFromPoint:NSMakePoint(20,20)];
            [window setTitle: applicationName];
            [window makeKeyAndOrderFront:nil];
            [NSApp activateIgnoringOtherApps:YES];
            [NSApp run];
        }
        return 0;
}' | gcc -fobjc-arc -framework Cocoa -x objective-c -o MicroApp - ; ./MicroApp

This will run Cocoa app with 1 window. Like on screenshot below

You can actually add menu using NSMenu

    id applicationMenuBar = [NSMenu new];
    id appMenuItem        = [NSMenuItem new];
    [applicationMenuBar addItem:appMenuItem];
    [NSApp setMainMenu: applicationMenuBar];