Toll free bridges

Question

As a newcomer to iPhone development and Objective-C in general over the last few weeks I have come across numerous mentions of \'Toll free bridges\' between CF and NS framew

Answer 1

Toll-free bridging means that the data structures are interchangeable. It is just as simple as casting — that's the "toll-free" part. Anyplace you can use the type on one side of the bridge, you can use the other. So, for example, you can create a CFString and then send NSString messages to it, or you can create an NSArray and pass the array to CFArray functions.

Apple keeps a list of the supported toll-free bridged types on its site.

Answer 2

Toll-free-bridging, although a funny name, is a very cool feature of the CoreFoundation classes. Essentially it boils down to the fact that you can cast between CoreFoundation and NextStep classes of the same name (CFString<->NSString, CFData<->NSData, CFDictionary<->NSDictionary... just to name some of the most commonly used.)

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