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copied!<p>The approach for Mac OS X is not much different from the approach for other non-Linux platforms (Windows, old Mac, BeOS). You could ask the SDL developers themselves why they did it this way, but I can see several reasons they may have chosen to do this:</p> <ul> <li>This keeps the dependencies of SDL code, which is focused on initializing SDL-specific subsystems (video, audio, timing, etc.) limited to the specific subsystems that SDL is especially designed to work with. I.e. this way, SDL stays lean and mean.</li> <li>It avoids having to introduce a new platform-specific subsystem for application initialization. Not everyone is going to want the bare-bones application object and menu that SDL sets up for Mac apps, not by a long shot – so if you were going to put it into <code>SDL_init</code>, you'd need to make it an optional subsystem so as not to inconvenience developers who don't need it.</li> <li>It handles inversion of control correctly, which is how Mac OS X and other application frameworks typically operate, while maintaining the operational semantics of SDL routines. SDL_init assumes it's going to be returning to the caller after initialization is complete, but if you tried naively to create an application object in <code>SDL_init</code> and invoke <code>[app run]</code> on it to finish initializing the application and launching, you'd never return. If you didn't call <code>run</code> there, you'd have to create a separate SDL function to set up the application run loop. This could complicate the SDL library quite a bit. The approach that was chosen avoids all this, by letting the framework take care of all the application set up first, and invoke the <code>SDL_main()</code> routine from <code>applicationDidFinishLaunching</code>.</li> <li>It makes it easy to convert SDL demos coded on Linux over to Mac OS X. You don't even have to rename main – the preprocessor renaming of <code>main()</code> to <code>SDL_main()</code> takes care of that for you!</li> </ul> <p>I'm guessing the last of these reasons is the primary driver behind the redefinition of main in <code>SDL_main.h</code>, which I agree is an ugly hack.</p> <p>If you're prepared to give up that level of cross-platform portability for your library and apps, I'd suggest simply modifying your <code>SDL_main.h</code> to remove the following line:</p> <pre><code>#define main SDL_main </code></pre> <p>and removing the following from the <code>SDLMain.m</code> in your project:</p> <pre><code>#ifdef main # undef main #endif </code></pre> <p>You shouldn't even need to recompile SDL if you do this. Note that <code>SDLMain.m</code> is already set up to invoke <code>SDL_main()</code> without the preprocessor hack, and nothing else in SDL is going to use this, so in this way you can you simply provide <code>SDL_main()</code> as your game's entry point.</p> <p>If you want to go the other way, taking over <code>main()</code> yourself, you'd still want to get rid of the <code>#define main SDL_main</code> hack in <code>SDL_main.h</code>, but other than that, you're not beholden to the <code>main()</code> that SDL provides for you. First, note that <code>SDLMain.{h,m}</code> are not part of the library proper; you must include them separately in your project. Second, note the following comments in <code>SDLMain.h</code>:</p> <pre><code>/* SDLMain.m - main entry point for our Cocoa-ized SDL app Initial Version: Darrell Walisser <dwaliss1@purdue.edu> Non-NIB-Code & other changes: Max Horn <max@quendi.de> Feel free to customize this file to suit your needs */ </code></pre> <p>That sounds to me like an invitation to go roll your own if these aren't working for you, starting with <code>SDLMain.{h,m}</code> as a model. And if you're rolling your own, you can do what you want! For that matter, you could write the equivalent of <code>SDLMain.m</code> in Haskell, using HOC, if that's what you want. Unless you're a whiz with HOC, though, I'd keep it simple.</p>

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