What is Swift’s @NSApplicationMain annotation?

In Xcode, go to File > New > Project, select “Cocoa application”, and call it “LookMaNoNSApplicationMain”. Run it. You get an empty window which reads “LookMaNoNSApplicationMain” in the title. When you focus the application, you get a menu bar for it along the top. This menu bar contains a whole lot of functionality. You can go View > Enter Full Screen, and the window maximizes. You can go Format > Font > Show Colors, and you get a color picker window. Where did all this functionality come from?!

The default project gives you a MainMenu.xib and an AppDelegate.swift. The AppDelegate.swift looks like this:

import Cocoa
@NSApplicationMain
class AppDelegate: NSObject, NSApplicationDelegate {
    @IBOutlet weak var window: NSWindow!
}

The AppDelegate class has the @NSApplicationMain annotation which causes your program to read the MainMenu.xib file and construct the window and menu based on its contents. All of those menu bar items are described in that MainMenu.xib file, which is several hundred lines long.

The first piece of complexity is the @NSApplicationMain annotation. @NSApplicationMain is part of the Swift language. Roughly speaking, @NSApplicationMain is a macro: it rewrites your program at compile time.

To understand what rewriting @NSApplicationMain does, let’s manually rewrite it. First, remove the @NSApplicationMain annotation in your AppDelegate.swift. Then create a new file, main.swift, with these contents:

import AppKit
_ = NSApplicationMain(CommandLine.argc, CommandLine.unsafeArgv)

Run your application again: it should behave exactly the same. This is roughly what the @NSApplicationMain annotation does: create the above main.swift file. The file main.swift is special: the file with this name is allowed to have statements at the top level. You should think of the contents of main.swift as being like the main() function in C.

main.swift calls the function NSApplicationMain(...). Don’t confuse this with the @NSApplicationMain annotation in Swift! The function NSApplicationMain(...) is the entry point for Cocoa applications. NSApplicationMain(...) never returns; instead, it sets up the UI event loop, which eventually exits using the C exit(...) function.

Notice that the behavior of @NSApplicationMain doesn’t depend on the class it is attached to! Indeed, you can create a new class Foo, and move the annotation there, which does not affect how the application behaves:

import Cocoa
class AppDelegate: NSObject, NSApplicationDelegate {
    @IBOutlet weak var window: NSWindow!
    func applicationDidFinishLaunching(_ aNotification: Notification) {
        print("finished loading")
    }
}
@NSApplicationMain
class Foo: NSObject, NSApplicationDelegate { }

The above program prints "finished loading", indicating that the AppDelegate class is being used, rather than the Foo class. What a strange design!

There are still many more mysteries in the default project, which I will cover in future posts:

• How does your AppDelegate class get found and instantiated?
• There is no reference to MainMenu.xib in main.swift, so how does MainMenu.xib get loaded?
• What are the contents of MainMenu.xib?
• How does your app’s NSApplication instance (which I’ll cover in future) get instantiated?

This page copyright James Fisher 2017. Content is not associated with my employer. Found an error? Edit this page.

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