Re: Swarm on Mac OSX 10.2.2?

[Paul Johnson]

Brad Cox wrote:
> That's very encouraging, Bill. I'm running 10.2.2 on a beige G3 myself 
> right now.
>
> At 08:54 PM -0500 12/6/02, Brad Cox wrote:
>
> > 5.   I am now working on avcall and libobjc in Swarm.   I think this is
> > the hard bit.  So I was looking for some help from the better programmers
> > after I had posted the story so far.   I have an old G3 Mac which I 
> > intend
> > to put online with a 10.2.2 OS and the compilers etc.  I promised an
> > account on this box to Russell and anyone else, who is willing to 
> > help, is
> > welcome to an account.
>
>
> I haven't touched libobjc in more than a decade but would be happy to help.
>
>     Brad Cox

That is the best news I've heard in a long time.

Just to make sure you are up to speed, I asked Marcus Daniels why Swarm 
implemented its own runtime libobjc and he explained that, at one time, 
that part of gcc was not actively maintained.  Now it is being 
maintained again and I think either it would be great to:

1. Figure out what improvments we have in libobjc and offer them back to 
 the gcc team ( they were fixes in compiling gcc on Alpha ) and the 
relocate the mframe code out of libobjc.  I would do this myself, except 
I do not understand enough about the setup to control whether Swarm 
builds and uses its own runtime.

or

2. Take the updated and optimized stuff in the current gcc libobjc and 
put them into Swarm.  If I understand the documentation in the gcc 
source itself, there have been optimizations that significantly speed up 
objc messaging in gcc and Swarm does not benefit from that because we 
have to older libobjc snapshot.


Here's what Alex Lancaster posted in Swarm-support on October 2, 2002. 
I would just offer a link to it, but I have no link, just the old email 
in my inbox.
 Alex said:

Marcus Daniel's post on the historical reasons for libobjc in Swarm is
useful here.  We are at a stage where we could definitely merge any
substantive changes in libobjc back into the mainline GNU runtime, and
switch out our dependence on our (locally modified version of) libobjc
(and use the GNU one).

One caveat would be to test that the ObjC package version they use in
Cygwin would work with Swarm, because as Marcus notes, historically
Cygwin didn't include the ObjC compiler or runtime as part of Cygwin,
and supporting MacOS X can't be at the expense of support under
Windows (since probably half our installation base is probably on
Windoze).

I have updated the relevant MacOS X task with the information from
Marcus' post:

http://savannah.nongnu.org/pm/task.php?func=detailtask&project_task_id=1132&group_id=1837&group_project_id=495

It's a task!  Somebody with more knowledge of GNUStep/ObjC issues
could take it up!  (Scott, Bill? ;-))


--
Paul E. Johnson                       email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045                FAX: (785) 864-5700


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