apple-cf

Safe, dependency-free Rust bindings for Apple's shared Core* frameworks — the foundation underneath the doom-fish macOS Rust suite.

Status: experimental. Carved out of screencapturekit-rs; more frameworks (CoreMedia, CoreVideo, Metal) will land in subsequent releases.

What's in the box

Module	Framework	Feature flag	Status
`cg`	CoreGraphics value types (`CGRect`, `CGPoint`, `CGSize`)	`cg`	✅
`iosurface`	IOSurface (zero-copy GPU buffers, multi-planar formats)	`iosurface`	✅
`dispatch_queue`	Grand Central Dispatch queues + QoS	`dispatch`	✅
`cm`	CoreMedia (`CMSampleBuffer`, `CMTime`, `CMBlockBuffer`, `CMFormatDescription`)	`cm`	✅
`cv`	CoreVideo (`CVPixelBuffer`, `CVPixelBufferPool`)	`cv`	✅
`utils`	Shared FFI helpers (always on)	—	✅
`metal`	Metal (`MTLDevice`, `MTLTexture`)	`metal`	🚧 planned

Why this crate exists

Every doom-fish crate that wraps a media-adjacent Apple framework needs the same primitives — CGRect, CVPixelBuffer, IOSurface, dispatch queues. Instead of re-vendoring those inside every crate (and drifting), this crate owns them once.

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ screencapturekit / videotoolbox / avfoundation / vision    │
│           ↓ depends on ↓                                   │
│ ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│ │  apple-cf  (this crate)                                │ │
│ └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
│           ↓ Swift @_cdecl bridge ↓                         │
│ Apple Core* frameworks                                     │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Requirements

macOS 13.0+
Xcode toolchain (Swift 5.9+); Command Line Tools alone is not enough — xcrun --sdk macosx --show-sdk-version must succeed
Apple Silicon or Intel Mac

Installation

[dependencies]
apple-cf = "0.1"

Or pick only the frameworks you need:

[dependencies]
apple-cf = { version = "0.1", default-features = false, features = ["cg", "iosurface"] }

Quick examples

Allocate an IOSurface and write a pixel

use apple_cf::iosurface::{IOSurface, IOSurfaceLockOptions};

# fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
let pixel_format = u32::from_be_bytes(*b"BGRA");
let surface = IOSurface::create(16, 16, pixel_format, 4)
    .ok_or("failed to allocate")?;

let mut guard = surface
    .lock(IOSurfaceLockOptions::NONE)
    .map_err(|c| format!("lock failed: {c}"))?;
if let Some(bytes) = guard.as_slice_mut() {
    bytes[0] = 0xFF;
}
# Ok(())
# }

Create a custom dispatch queue

use apple_cf::dispatch_queue::{DispatchQoS, DispatchQueue};

let q = DispatchQueue::new("com.example.work", DispatchQoS::UserInitiated);

Work with CGRect

use apple_cf::cg::CGRect;

let r = CGRect::new(10.0, 20.0, 800.0, 600.0);
assert_eq!(r.center().x, 410.0);

Architecture

This crate uses the same Swift-bridge pattern as the rest of the doom-fish crates:

swift-bridge/Sources/<Framework>Bridge/ exposes a thin @_cdecl C surface
src/ffi/mod.rs declares the matching extern "C" bindings
src/<framework>/ provides the safe Rust API on top

The Rust crate has zero runtime dependencies.

Roadmap

CoreMedia — CMSampleBuffer, CMTime, CMFormatDescription, CMBlockBuffer (carve out from screencapturekit-rs, leaving SCStreamFrameInfo attachment readers in place upstream)
CoreVideo — CVPixelBuffer, CVPixelBufferPool
Metal — MTLDevice, MTLTexture, MTLCommandQueue
CoreFoundation — opt-in basic types if needed by downstream crates

Migrating screencapturekit-rs to consume apple-cf is the proof point that closes this story.

License

Licensed under either of Apache-2.0 or MIT at your option.

apple-cf 0.1.2