Objective C?

[Helge Hess]

Stan Shebs wrote:
> Helge Hess wrote:
> > 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?)

I meant with 'active development' not that the runtime isn't maintained.
The GNU runtime is stable (except for forwarding on some platforms) and
also widely used (though the NeXT/Apple userbase is probably bigger).
Could you explain what features are going to be added (=active
development ;-) to the NeXT runtime (maybe the GC support which is
already existing in GNU libobjc ?).

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

Is the NeXT runtime also submitted to FSF ? If not, please take care
that integrating Apple ObjC changes doesn't break the ObjC frontend's
ability to generate code for the GNU runtime.

> 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.

I wonder what is undefined in the language. Can't the statements of ObjC
added in exactly the same way to C++ like to C ? Also I don't think that
the separate hierachies are confusing, after all the idea is
*integration* between the two environments and ObjC++ does that pretty
well.
I guess that should be interesting for Apple as well, since a lot of old
MacOS code should be C++, or ? How are you going to allow developers to
reuse their old C++ code when porting to Cocoa ?

> 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.

No offense intendend - but you are only explaining the Apple POV (which
is ok). Right now the standard runtime of gcc is the *GNU* runtime, gcc
is *GNU* software. The primary goal should be to improve the standard
runtime(/gcc), not the code of some company (would be somewhat different
if the NeXT libobjc would be assigned to FSF).
Also I didn't say that there are not people knowing the GNU *runtime*.
The runtime is very well understood and indeed very easy to understand.
The difficult part is the compiler, for which no (gcc) developers exist.
But the compiler is the thing which could be extended somewhat, as I
mentioned, namespaces, native exceptions, blocks would be nice.

Greetings
  Helge