Re: builtin_apply et al

[Stan Shebs <shebs at apple dot com>]

Nicola Pero wrote:

> > > I can see that the builtin_apply *might* be useful somewhere, but is it
> > > really being used beyond test cases?
> > >
> > > Dare I suggest deprecating this 'feature'? (rather than fixing it)
> > The consensus among the few who've thought about this is that
> > yes, it should flushed from libobjc and then officially deprecated.
>
> Hmmm. :-)
>
> Yes/maybe ... but what are you suggesting to replace it with ?
>
> Some sort of reliable and portable mechanism must be provided by the
> compiler (or by compiler libraries) to replace it, because the Objective-C
> libraries do need a way to do such stuff.
>
> I've been told in the past it should be replaced with libffi - the main
> problem there is ... how much reliable and portable is libffi ?
Needed for Java, so gets regular attention for that reason, and has
platform specific code for lots of platforms. Libffi could be thought
of as an implementation of builtin_apply.

> ObjC needs a certain amount of visibility into C calling conventions
> to do its thing, but it's tricky to generalize and not many hackers
> work on libobjc (the NeXT/Apple runtime mostly does it with assembly
> code, and is thus not very portable).
>
>
> Not sure what your point is here.
Just calibrating expectations - it may be a while before builtin_apply
can go away.

Stan