apple-cf

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

Status: v0.7.1 tightens the safety documentation — every unsafe impl Send/Sync now carries a // SAFETY: justification comment, Drop implementations uniformly null-guard their release calls, and the doom-fish-utils version constraint follows the crate-family >=X.Y, <X.(Y+2) convention. See COVERAGE.md for the framework summary and COVERAGE_AUDIT_V2.md for the full symbol audit.

What's in the box

Why this crate exists

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

Safe Rust wrappers
    ├── CoreFoundation / Dispatch / CoreMedia / CoreVideo ergonomic APIs
    ├── exhaustive raw C bindings in `apple_cf::raw`
    ├── direct C FFI for value-only primitives where appropriate
    └── Swift @_cdecl bridge for reference-counted / callback-heavy surfaces

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 = "0.7"

Or pick only the frameworks you need:

[dependencies]
apple-cf = { version = ">=0.7, <0.9", default-features = false, features = ["cg", "cm", "cv", "dispatch", "iosurface"] }

Quick examples

Build CoreFoundation values and collections

use apple_cf::cf::{CFArray, CFString};

let first = CFString::new("first");
let second = CFString::new("second");
let array = CFArray::from_values(&[&first, &second]);
assert_eq!(array.len(), 2);

Create a timer-backed dispatch source

use apple_cf::dispatch_queue::DispatchSource;
use std::thread;
use std::time::Duration;

let source = DispatchSource::timer(Duration::from_millis(5), Duration::from_millis(1));
source.resume();
thread::sleep(Duration::from_millis(20));
source.cancel();
assert!(source.fire_count() > 0);

Allocate an IOSurface-backed CVPixelBuffer

use apple_cf::cv::CVPixelBuffer;

let pixel_buffer = CVPixelBuffer::create(16, 16, 0x4247_5241)
    .expect("pixel buffer");
assert_eq!(pixel_buffer.width(), 16);

Architecture

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

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

The Rust crate has zero runtime dependencies.

Examples and tests

This release ships 15 numbered examples plus dedicated smoke tests for:

• CoreFoundation primitives, collections, property lists, resources, runtime helpers
• Dispatch queues, dispatch_async, dispatch_async_and_wait, dispatch_apply, groups, semaphores, timer sources, and raw main-queue access
• CMTimeRange, CMTimebase, CMMetadataFormatDescription, and low-level CMTag/CMSync coverage through apple_cf::raw
• CVBuffer, CVImageBuffer, CVPixelBuffer, CVMetalTextureCache, and the remaining CVMetal entry points through apple_cf::raw
• Exhaustive low-level constants / inline helpers surfaced by apple_cf::raw

CVDisplayLink remains exempt in the audit because Apple deprecated the family on macOS 15.

License

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