Feature #17741: Ruby links to `objc` for convenience - this should be moved into a native ext

• Status: Open
• Assignee: -
• Target version: -

[rickmark (Rick Mark)]

As a convenance to extension developers Ruby on macOS always links to libobjc. This could be better handled with a native ObjC extension so that one could require 'objc' to add this to the process.

The extension would link to libobjc and provide bindings to objc_msgSend and friends. By not linking to libobjc we can also avoid linking to libc++abi and all that entails.

This makes ruby on mac more similar to ruby when compiled on other platforms.

[mame (Yusuke Endoh)]

• Related to Feature #17730: Ruby on macOS transitively links to ~150 dylibs added

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

As far as I remember, I've heard that libobjc needs to be linked against the executable file instead of dynamically loaded modules for startup routines.
I'm not sure if still it is true though.