[Pythonmac-SIG] Towards PyObjC 5.0

[Ronald Oussoren]

Hi,

Just a quick message about development on PyObjC 5.0.  The process of updating PyObjC for macOS 10.14 is going faster than expected, although it has helped that I took time of from work during WWDC to work on this.

I expect to push out a first beta release of PyObjC 5 during the EuroPython 2018 sprints. This release should be feature complete (barring surprises in future SDK betas). 

This is turning out to be a major milestone for PyObjC: with some luck PyObjC 5.0 will support almost all public frameworks in macOS, with the exception of deprecated frameworks that aren’t already wrapped and the Metal frameworks (Metal and MetalPerformanceShaders).

Major items on my TODO list until then:
- Finish a number of bindings that require manual wrappers due to APIs that are too complex to expres correctly in metadata files
- Work on support for APIs that have SIMD types as arguments or return values (such as vector_float3 in ObjC)
- Work on providing DeprecationWarnings for APIs that are deprecated in macOS. The basic framework for this is present, I “just” have add correct metadata for this.

Beyond 5: My current plan is that PyObjC 5 will be the last version of PyObjC that supports Python 2.7 and PowerPC. 

I have not yet decided on 32-bit x86 support, that might be dropped as well (at least in the released binaries). Dropping support for 32-bit x86 would primarily make it easier to provide wheels, as the compiler tools in Xcode 10 no longer support that architecture.

Ronald