builtin_apply et al

[Nicola Pero]

> > I can see that the builtin_apply *might* be useful somewhere, but is it
> > really being used beyond test cases?
> >
> > Dare I suggest deprecating this 'feature'? (rather than fixing it)
> 
> The consensus among the few who've thought about this is that
> yes, it should flushed from libobjc and then officially deprecated.

Hmmm. :-)

Yes/maybe ... but what are you suggesting to replace it with ?

Some sort of reliable and portable mechanism must be provided by the
compiler (or by compiler libraries) to replace it, because the Objective-C
libraries do need a way to do such stuff.

I've been told in the past it should be replaced with libffi - the main
problem there is ... how much reliable and portable is libffi ?



> ObjC needs a certain amount of visibility into C calling conventions
> to do its thing, but it's tricky to generalize and not many hackers
> work on libobjc (the NeXT/Apple runtime mostly does it with assembly
> code, and is thus not very portable).

Not sure what your point is here.