MulleFoundation, technically speaking

The class library of mulle-objc is the MulleFoundation. For compatibility its name is shortened in #import statements to just “Foundation”. e.g. #import <Foundation/Foundation.h>.

The MulleFoundation is assembled on a per-platform basis from various components.

Required Toolset

mulle-bootstrap

The dependencies are managed with mulle-bootstrap. If you clone the MulleFoundation repository, mulle-bootstrap will fetch and build all dependencies.

git

git is used by mulle-bootstrap to download the dependencies.

cmake (make)

cmake is a cross-platform Makefile generator. It is used instead of autoconf because it is somewhat easier to use and is available on more platforms (Windows).

mulle-clang

The mulle-clang compiler is needed to compile the various frameworks. They do not work with a different Objective-C compiler.

Required Libraries

(In addition to those needed by the runtime itself)

Porting considerations

The Foundation is designed so that you can add and remove Features cleanly and quickly.

• You don’t have and want Expat/XML ?
  • Rip out the MulleObjCExpatFoundation.
• libicu is too heavy and you don’t need NSCalendar ?
  • Drop MulleObjCICUFoundation from the build.
• You want to support another platform ?
  • Don’t obscure the code with #ifdefs but add your platform specific code in categories like MulleObjCDarwinFoundation does.

MulleObjC and MulleObjCFoundation should be ready to run on any platform. For a new platform, try to build on top of MulleObjCPosixFoundation if possible. Otherwise consider creating a MulleObjCCommonFoundation and extracting reusable code from MulleObjCPosixFoundation to MulleObjCCommonFoundation. Then build your MulleObjCPlatformFoundation on top of this MulleObjCCommonFoundation.

If you want to run a different class library with mulle-objc, it would be probably easiest to build on top of MulleObjC.