ObjC improvements and ObjC++

[Stan Shebs]

Matt Austern wrote:

> On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, at 10:51AM, Mark Mitchell wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 2003-07-07 at 18:47, Stan Shebs wrote:
>>
>>> Now that Apple's developers are happily banging away on Panther
>>> and Xcode and GCC 3.3, we have an opportunity to get local work
>>> on Objective-C into FSF GCC 3.4, and to get started on Obj-C++
>>> as well.
>>
>>
>> Thanks for presenting the plan!
>>
>> The overall plan makes sense to me -- but I don't think 3.4 is a
>> realistic target.  Stage 1 for GCC 3.4 is already closed, and this is
>> inevitably going to be a major change.  I'm also going to be staring at
>> the C++ changes very carefully before they go in; the basic "mutually
>> oblivious" strategy makes sense, but the devil is in those dang
>> details.  (Overload resolution for Objective-C classes?  Template
>> deduction?  Etc.)
>
>
> Some of the details are tricky, yes.  But just to state the obvious: we
> are not talking about extensions to C++, and we are not talking about
> changing the behavior of cc1plus.  We're talking about a new front
> end.

I didn't say that myself because although our current cc1objplus
is a separate executable, that's largely because of yacc's nature,
and it makes the build process a little messier; with the new parser
it might be lower-impact to incorporate ObjC++ as an runtime-enabled
addition to C++.  The choice is somewhat orthogonal to the mechanics
of adding new code to the parser, so we can decide when we're further
along and know better how much change is involved.

Stan