Why does casting a function generate a run-time abort?

[Zack Weinberg]

Andrew Pinski <pinskia@physics.uc.edu> writes:

>> Lemme ask you why Objective-C message dispatch needs this.  It's
>> impossible to get "right" on IA64 and a few others.
>
> It is only needed with the NeXT^wApple runtime :) so ...
> The GNU runtime does not produce these casts at all and is safe.

Well, ok, but that doesn't answer my question.

zw