Declare int main inside a library (.a file)

If you really are going to have the starting point for your program inside a library (which seems nonsensical), I would call it myMain or something similar and then each program that you link to this library will have its own main that just calls myMain in the library. I couldn't tell you about the intricacies of the compiler and linker and why you're having problems with it, but it definitely strikes me as wrong to have main in an object archive.

-Lee

 

Well, you just gave an example of NSApplicationMain. That is pretty much the same as my example of a myMain in the library and each application having its own main that calls myMain.

I couldn't parse the piece about the delegate situation.

If you want a single entry point into your library, and to control the whole of application execution in there, that's fine. You don't have to have a separate init method called from main if it makes more sense to have a single entry point that is intended to manage the whole lifecycle of the app. You just can't call it main. My suggestion stands, and i think your NSApplicationMain example reaffirms it.

-Lee

 

Theoretically, you could just subclass NSApplication, create a framework, and build all you applications against that framework. It could be as simple as

Code:

// just override one method in the subclass

- (void)run {

    // do your special initialization here

    [super run];

    // you could also put common wrap up code here

}

This could indeed be the simplest way to put a common main function into a group of Cocoa apps. This is kind of like exactly what object oriented programming was designed for. Use this technique cautiously, though. Do not just jump into it without first reading all the available documentation. For instance, I would not count on any AppKit objects behaving in predictable ways prior to the call to super.