Re: Objective-C++

[Travis Griggs]

On Apr 26, 2005, at 18:23, Greg Parker wrote:

> <snip>
>
> * GC
> Apple is working on a garbage collection system for Objective-C. It is 
> still under development, but does not use the Boehm GC available in 
> GNUstep. These compiler changes mostly add a write barrier when 
> assigning Objective-C instance pointers to ivars and a few other 
> places. The write barrier is a runtime function, and is similar to the 
> fast dispatching above. This is likely to evolve further, and probably 
> isn't interesting for GNUstep yet.
> <snip>

This is very interesting indeed. As a long time Smalltalk programmer, I 
really like objc, but the lack of a real memory management story is 
always frustrating. I'm maintaining/evolving a large relatively complex 
C program. I've played with C++'izing it. I've played with objc'ing it. 
I'm currently playing with GC'ing it via the Boehm collector. This 
change is by far the most liberating and useful of the three (keep in 
mind that a Smalltalker well knows the power of objects in a program).

The gnu gcc stuff has the ability to compile with and link against a 
Boehm gcc version of the runtime. I've found it really handy. I'm 
curious _why_ you wouldn't choose to start with the Boehm solution?

I do find it ironic that the same update set includes a) stuff to make 
the programmers life easier (automatic memory mangement) and b) stuff 
to pollute your program with possibly the most complex language known 
to mankind. :)


> --
Travis Griggs
Objologist
"It had better be a pretty good meeting, to be better than no meeting
at all" -- Boyd K Packer


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