Re: GSObjCRuntime / GDL / GSWeb

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 9 Apr 2010, at 21:12, David Chisnall wrote:

> On 9 Apr 2010, at 19:13, David Ayers wrote:
> 
>> I seems that the runtime abstraction layer is being deprecated.  
> 
> Is it?

Some parts of it ... 

>> I would
>> have expected that the introduction of yet another runtime would
>> actually strengthen the need for the abstraction layer.  Yet I
>> appreciate that supporting three runtimes is quite a task.
> 
> As far as I am aware, we are still providing GSObjCRuntime.  We are also 
> supporting the new OS X 10.5 runtime APIs and slowly rewriting GSObjCRuntime 
> to use this, rather than poke runtime data structures directly, but I didn't 
> think we were removing it.  We still use it for mixins and so on.

Essentially we now have *two*  runtime abstraction layers, since we now have 
the new code you provided from Etoile to wrap the GNU runtime and emulate the 
Apple Objc2 runtime API.
So, I want to use that new API for all the basic functionality, while retaining 
GSObjCRuntime functions for more complex stuff which does not have a simple, 
fairly direct equivalent in the Apple API.
That avoids us having two abstraction layers to maintain,  and means that it's 
easier to port Apple code to run on GNUstep (and even easier for people to 
write GNUstep code using apple books and online resources).