Re: Just Curious... Why not an Obj-C runtime in the Dot NET or Dot GNU Common Language Runtimes?

[Helge Hess]

On Feb 24, 2005, at 12:45, Quentin Mathé wrote:
> … but .Net CLR supports Smalltalk. Do you think it doesn't support the 
> whole Smalltalk features set ?

I don't know the .NET Smalltalk (do you have a pointer?), but of course 
you can build another runtime _on top_ of the CLR object runtime. In 
this case you loose all the interoperability features though.
The point of CLR is that you can reuse a class written in C# in VB and 
C++ (and other "true" CLR languages) without any wrapping.

Two major things are missing in CLR:
- the ability to patch existing classes (categories)
- the "hook" to catch unimplemented methods (-forward::)
Posing of course also doesn't work. The worst problem for me is 
actually the missing categories.
I have some ideas on how that could be worked around (by on-the-fly 
generation of new classes), but all that is quite hackish and wouldn't 
fit perfectly well into the CLR object system.

> For Mono CLR, the things are a bit different, because it is still 
> lacking support for dynamic languages like Python etc. (Smalltalk, 
> Objective-C are dynamic languages too, then no luck currently).

Could you elaborate? What exactly is missing in Mono from an CLR point 
of view?

Greets,
  Helge
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