Re: Objective-C legacy code (ex: New Objective-C maintainer)

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Ovidiu Predescu wrote:
> 
> 1) Is the GNU runtime going to be replaced with the Apple/NeXT runtime?

Not any time soon, and probably not ever.  There is a bunch of
complicated history behind the split, and Apple's runtime seems to
be interconnected with the OS in interesting ways.  That's OK with
me though, it's like having multiple implementations of a JVM; many
if not most of objc-act.c's connections to the runtime are the same
for GNU and Apple versions.

> 2) Is the GNU Objective-C front-end going to change in an incompatible way by
> merging features from Apple's front-end?
> 
> I certainly hope this will not break existing code. As far as I'm aware there
> are no major pending differences in the two front-ends which could break this
> compatibility.

That's what I'm seeing too.

> The Objective-C++ compiler front-end is the biggest piece which
> is missing from the GNU compiler, but I don't know what are Apple's plans with
> it.

I can't say much about the ObjC++ work yet, since it's in the
experimental stage and I'm not the implementor, but I'm not going to
accept any work into CVS that messes up the existing ObjC frontend.

Stan