Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

[David Chisnall]

On 10 Oct 2009, at 04:26, Jamie Ramone wrote:

> > Well, for me llvm and having a garbage collector and blocks would  
> > make gnustep
> > much more interesting.
>
> Maybe, maybe not. After studying the Grand Central Dispatch docs, I
> realized I could implement the whole thing without the need for
> compiler awareness (i.e. as a pure library, no ^ operator). The only
> thing it would miss would be the environment snapshots, but this
> property is not essential. And such code could also be (partly)
> included in the GCC so one could end up having blocks with compiler
> awareness. And considering that the GCC is freedomware, and can thus
> have new features added any time, I don't see it as being THAT much
> behind some other compilers. As for GC, do you REALLY want that? I
> think it's way overrated. It tends to encourage bad programming
> practices, and usually kills performance.


For what it's worth, we had working blocks and garbage collection  
before Apple.  By several years for GC, by a few months for blocks[1],  
and blocks are used EtoileFoundation's collection categories.

I've never used the GC stuff in GNUstep, but apparently it works, and  
there's been ongoing work to make it compatible with Apple's  
implementation.

David

[1] Supported natively by the new runtime.  Needs the ObjectiveC2  
framework from Étoilé with the GCC runtime.  Requires using clang to  
compile.

-- Sent from my Cray X1