rawdrawandroid VS objc-ast-experiments

> A little bit of this also has to do to stick it to all those Luddites on the internet who post "that's impossible" or "you're doing it wrong" to Stack Overflow questions... Requesting permissions in the JNI "oh you have to do that in Java" or other dumb stuff like that. I am completely uninterested in your opinions of what is or is not possible. This is computer science. There aren't restrictions. I can do anything I want. It's just bits. You don't own me.

From the wonderful CNLohr's rawdraw justification[0]. I always enjoy these kinds of efforts because they embody the true hacker spirit. This is Hacker News after all!

0: https://github.com/cnlohr/rawdrawandroid?tab=readme-ov-file#...

My knowledge of the subject is limited and English is not my first language, but I remember reading this some time ago and it may be useful. https://github.com/cnlohr/rawdrawandroid Another option is Godot, I saw applications made with it.

Might not be impossible: Someone made an android application totally in C. If it can be done in C, it can be done in Rust as well I presume? https://github.com/cnlohr/rawdrawandroid

C isn't the primary language of user-space mobile development. while possible, it is inadvisable. as for its feasability, the court is in your favour (on android)! it is possible to "replace" the lockscreen. you will be leaving yourself vulnerable to attacks the actual lockscreen can prevent, but it can be done. here, this article goes into the downsides of this unrooted method, while also explaining the rooted method. Good luck! (and use java/kotlin)

Check this: https://github.com/cnlohr/rawdrawandroid

Here's something similar by Garret Bass:

https://github.com/garettbass/oc

...I also experimented a bit with parsing macOS system headers via clang-ast-dump and then code-generating C and Zig APIs but that didn't get far:

https://github.com/floooh/objc-ast-experiments

...with a bit of effort and maybe using libclang instead of clang-ast-dump that's definitely feasible though.

I guess a similar approach is used by the official C++ bindings for Metal:

https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/

This is basically also what the "official" C++ API for Metal does (https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/), it's an automatically generated bindings wrapper which calls into ObjC runtime functions.

I also dabbled a bit with this idea by parsing clang AST-dumps of macOS system headers:

https://github.com/floooh/objc-ast-experiments

Unfortunately this is very brittle, and also broke on ARM CPUs, I guess the shim code needs some ABI adjustments (famously, objc_msgSend has multiple "ABI shapes": https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/objc_msgsends-new-prototype.h...).