Objective C?

[Stan Shebs]

Helge Hess wrote:
> 
> > 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.

There is development on the runtime at Apple, since it's part of
the OS X system.  The runtime is different from the one used by
GNU though.  The language proper hasn't been changing, which IMHO is
just as well (remember the C++-du-jour of prestandardization days?)

> 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.

Yes.  In fact the copyright assignment was sent to the FSF just today.

> 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.

ObjC++ is a sticky problem.  The language is not well-defined, and
its implementation involves a combination of hacks and cloning of the
C++ frontend.  The ObjC and C++ class hierarchies are actually
separate, which is, uh, "interesting".  I'd be astonished if our
poor overworked G++ maintainers wanted to try to support ObjC++ too.

> > 3) Where can I start helping out?

The darwin-development list at Apple has some discussion of ObjC
issues, and some of the people on it are extremely knowledgeable
about the runtime - I've been learning a lot from them.  ObjC is
going to be important to Apple for a long time, because the standard
app framework Cocoa depends on it.

Stan