Re: using gcj for a different language - is it possible?

["Florin" <fmateoc at mfire dot com>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andrew Pinski" <pinskia@physics.uc.edu>
To: <tromey@redhat.com>
Cc: "Florin" <fmateoc@mfire.com>; "Andrew Pinski" <pinskia@physics.uc.edu>;
<java@gcc.gnu.org>
Sent: Friday, January 09, 2004 1:10 AM
Subject: Re: using gcj for a different language - is it possible?



> I am replying this to because I have some intentions to add a bridge
> between the two
> languages in the future.  Right now the objective-C runtime does not
> know anything
> about the GCJ's runtime and other way is true also.
>
> The Objective-C runtime always calls a single function to get message
> passed to an
> object while Java almost always uses vtables.  Both can do runtime
> loading of classes.
> I have not looked into how Java stores it classes that are loaded
> runtime but
> you can read libobjc's source to find out how Objective-C stores it.
>

Do you happen to know if exception handling in Objective-C is anything like
the one in Smalltalk? Tom pointed this area out as potentially very
difficult, since gcc might not support Smalltalk exception semantics (in
Smalltalk the handler is reached before any unwinding happens, and the
handler gets to decide if the unwinding happens or not, it may choose to
retry the exception-generating operation).

And does Objective-C support operations like #become: (switching the
identities of two objects)?

Thank you,

Florin