Better support for Objective-C

[Martin v. Loewis]

> I guess a lot of people misunderstood my post.  All I'm asking for now
> is advice. If I wanted to make a change to how gcc works, how can I be
> sure that the gcc maintainers will even consider my patch?

Did you already describe a change in the way GCC works? All I saw is

# His proposal was to have the compiler construct some sort of table
# that would give the relative offsets of the arguments in a frame
# given the type of argument and previous argument.
...

# My question is, do you have any thoughts on the best way to
# accomplish this?

Perhaps I misinterpreted this question as: Please tell me how to
generate such tables, and what you really meant was: If I modify GCC
to emit such tables, would such a patch be accepted?

Without being a maintainer, my guess the answer to the last question
is: Yes, if the patch is done right otherwise (coding style, and so
on). A number of front-ends generate a lot of 'tables' (C++ and Java
are particular notorious in this area), and nobody cares except
perhaps the users of those specific front-ends.

As the next step, you may want to write a specification of exactly how
you want the tables to be layed out. This takes less effort than
implementing them to be generated, and people on this list may find
the time to review your specification, and say whether it is
implementable.

Then, you could try to specify an implementation strategy, such as 'I
plan to modify this and that function in this and that way'. If these
functions are all in the Objective-C front-end, there likely won't be
any objections; if you plan to modify back-end functions, it might be
a good idea to announce your changes in advance.

Good luck,
Martin