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Intel helps Redmond ingest Objective-C code

Accelerate framework added to Windows Bridge for iOS

Intel has dropped a slab of code into Microsoft's Windows Bridge for iOS project, starting with APIs for vector maths, matrix maths, digital signal processing (DSP) and image processing.

According to an announcement posted at Microsoft, Intel wants to make sure that developers working in Objective-C can run their code on Intel-based Windows 10 devices as easily as possible.

Still described as a “preview” at Github, the Windows Bridge for iOS's first release was nine months ago. The Microsoft open source project is an Objective-C development environment for Visual Studio with support for iOS APIs.

Intel's first contribution to the project, the Accelerate framework (here for Apple developers), targets scientific computing requirements, including audio and image filters.

The Microsoft post, by Chipzilla's engineering manager Simonjit Dutta and Microsoft program manager Nick Gerard, outlines a demo with code samples for image manipulation using Objective-C code and Accelerate framework APIs, running on Windows 10.

The post also calls out contributions including BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) APIs, accelerometer APIs, and gyroscope APIs, and promises that Intel will make other contributions to the project in future.

As we noted when the bridge was first released, it's a pretty straightforward toolset that includes an Objective-C compiler that will be integrated with a future version of Visual Studio, an Objective-C runtime for Windows that provides functions like message passing and automatic reference counting, and a set of header files and libraries that make available a subset of the iOS APIs.

In February, Microsoft decided that its parallel project, an Android bridge for Windows, wasn't what the world wanted and scrapped it. ®

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