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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