Objective C?

[Helge Hess]

Corwin Light-Williams wrote:
> I'd like to know more about the objective-c effort.
> Is there a good place for info?

comp.lang.objective-c or the GNUstep mailing lists (www.gnustep.org)
might be better.

> 1) where the language is going- is there further
> expansion in the works, or is it being driven
> by Apple now? If the GCC project changes the
> language, will apple bring in those changes?

There is no visible active development on the language itself nor on the
runtime - neither by GNU people nor by Apple, as far as I know.
Apple is going to check in their changes to gcc and use gcc afterwards
(until now Apple used to have their own, patched gcc compiler).
Therefore any changes committed into gcc are likely to be implicitly
used by Apple as well.

One of the most notably differences between GNU and NeXT/Apple gcc is,
that the latter supports ObjC++, which is quite nice for integrating C++
and ObjC code. It would be great to have that in the GNU gcc as well.

> 2) What open projects are there? What is the
> state of the Objective-C compiler?

As mentioned there is no active development on the compiler. It is
pretty stable (pretty=it has some little, but no serious bugs).
There are some 'tasks' which need to be done, mostly in stabilizing the
runtime. This is mostly related to dynamic dispatch and forwarding
functionality of libobjc. Forwarding is the part of libobjc which is
seriously broken on some platforms and a generic solution for that stuff
(ala ffi or ffcal) would be great.

> 3) Where can I start helping out?

Don't know. Right now there seems to be no ObjC interested person out
there who has knowledge in gcc compiler technology. Ovidiu Predescu, who
is the maintainer of GNU ObjC, used to have some knowledge here, but
unfortunatly he isn't doing any ObjC related stuff anymore.

Well, I have some ideas what would be nice to have (eg namespaces and
blocks), but I'm not sure how you would like to help nor what your
capabilities are.

> Pardon me if these questions are stupid, but
> I've looked around the web page and can't
> find the same sort of info about obj-c as i
> can about c or c++. A simple pointer
> would be great.

The gcc ObjC community is far smaller than the gcc C or C++ community.
One result is that people spend working on stuff, not on docu.

Greetings
  Helge Hess