Re: State of Swarm on Mac OS X

[Ed Baskerville]

On Wednesday, September 18, 2002, at 02:12 AM, address@hidden
wrote:

>Scott Christley wrote a good summary of the problem on this list some
>weeks back.  Basically the GNU ObjC and Next/Apple Objc have a different
>message passing mechanism.  The compiler can be instructed to use either
>method with the -fgnu-runtime or -fnext-runtime flags.  The problem is
>that this flag acts on a per file basis.  so you can't compile a program
>which uses both methods.  The solution is to write a bit of C glue to
>allow passing messages using the method of choice on a per message basis.

Glue code is all well and good...but as a Cocoa/Swarm programmer I
wouldn't want to deal with that.

Seems like there might be a couple ways to use the Cocoa runtime
exclusively, but both would be a lot of work, and one would significantly
split the source tree (if this doesn't make sense, it's probably because I
don't have ObjC experience outside Cocoa):

(1) Implement the GNU primitive object types as wrappers on Foundation
objects. This leaves the Swarm code intact, but linking against the new
implementation and running in the Apple runtime.

(2) Reimplement the Swarm primitives in terms of Foundation objects.
Perhaps more work, and would make OS X Swarm code totally unportable. This
method would integrate better with Cocoa, however, and if you're using
Cocoa UI stuff your front end is already unportable anyway. :)

>Perhaps this would make a good project for a Computer Science student.<g>

I'd like to work on this, but don't really have time right now...possibly
next semester. (I'll probably be taking a complex systems simulation class
using Swarm next semester too, so I'll have more motivation...)

--Ed

P.S.
Are there any cluster/distributed versions of Swarm out there?


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