Re: person interested in GNUstep development

[David Chisnall]

Hi,

On 22 Feb 2013, at 10:33, bubble rogue <address@hidden> wrote:

> I have a small ObjC compiler for ARM7, 6502, ARM9 etc. in the works. I
> wanted to make it compile itself e.g. on gameboy advance. There's also
> a small libc using ObjC, libcarm. Everything is hosted here :
> http://code.google.com/p/libobjcgbarm , licensed under the GPL version
> 2 and WIP. The design is a bit weird though.

It sounds interesting, but I try to avoid looking at any GPL'd code.

> I ventured a bit on the net and found other objc compilers, even
> arm-eabi-gcc with objc support.

Clang supports ARM EABI, although there some problems with exceptions (the old 
NS_HANDLER stuff works, but that uses setjmp.  Zero-cost exception support is 
buggy, although there are patches currently under review to fix it and it 
should be working in 3.3).

> I wrote some small toy programs in objc and GNUStep for getting
> familiar with the APIs, and now have some questions :
> 
> . Is there a roadmap for objc 2.0+ integration in GNUstep or other NS
> environments ?

GNUstep fully supports Objective-C 2.0 (a term now deprecated) code, along with 
all of the newer enhancements such as automatic reference counting when 
compiled with clang and linked with the GNUstep Objective-C runtime.

> . If I wanted to port GNUstep to GBA, compiler-wise, what do I do then ?

The GBA is, as far as I know, a basic ARM7TDMI, which is ARMv4.  This should be 
supported by clang, as it's still one of ARM's most-shipped chips and a number 
of ARM guys contribute to LLVM and Clang (and they're hiring more, if you're 
looking for a job...).  The ARM assembly in libobjc2 should work, but I've not 
tested it on anything less than ARMv7.

> . Is there a place here on this list for objc extension development,
> research on OOP or graphics ?

Objective-C extensions generally don't get pushed upstream without buy-in from 
Apple, but there is definitely scope for discussing them.

David

-- Sent from my PDP-11