Re: State of Swarm on Mac OS X

[moetteli]

Am Mittwoch, 18.09.02 um 17:05 Uhr schrieb 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.

I do agree on 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):

The same is valid for me. So that's perhaps the reason, why I don't see 
yet, why the different message dispatching call is such a huge problem. 
This fonction should only be called in one object like (Cocoas) 
NSInvocation. Or differently said, as long as you encapsulate all the 
tinkering with the runtime system into a separate object (what OO 
actually demands you), you could only make a few precompiler directives 
to solve the problem.

And there's another thing, that bathers me/I would like to propose: Why 
keep and maintain Swarm's own foundation classes, when you could go 
GNUstep? And by doing that you gonna have some more programmers for 
free working indirectly for Swarm AND you get MOSX compatibility? Apart 
from that, Swarm could use additional stuff like Distributed Objects 
and thelike.

I know, that both propositions include probably a lot of work and even 
a complete clean up. But I would probably do a  lot of that myself, if 
the Swarm community does agree with that. I can't yet promise it 
though. But those are the plans I have for my dissertation.


> Are there any cluster/distributed versions of Swarm out there?

That's comes close to something I also gonna need: A thread-save 
version.


Re
Phil


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