Re: CoreBase: necessary additions for WebKit

[David Chisnall]

On 30 Jun 2017, at 21:46, Daniel Ferreira (theiostream) <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Hi Stefan,
> 
> I don't know if you've been following the list for my huge thread on a
> TODO list that GNUstep needs to implement for WebKit[1], but among
> those items are some related to CoreBase. I've scratched the surface
> of how to implement some of them but I'd like your two cents before I
> start working on it and possibly screw things up.
> 
> In order of priority from first to last, these are the issues:
> 
> 1) Implement -[NSRunLoop getCFRunLoop]
> This one is really, really needed for WebCore to set up a lot of stuff
> -- and is the only one in this list we can't live without.
> 
> I can think of solving this by creating a category to NSRunLoop in
> CoreBase that implements this method by creating a new CFRunLoop with
> all sorts of information we can gather from the receiving NSRunLoop. I
> don't know if any bizarre issues will arise, though. Does this seem
> sane?

I suspect that this will probably not work, because the bridging expects the 
two runloops to coexist.  Ideally, we’d have a libdispatch-based implementation 
of both NSRunLoop and CFRunLoop and each would then be a fairly thin wrapper 
around the underling dispatch queue.

> 4) Missing CFLocale functions
> I suppose I can figure out the Unicode functions in CFLocale by myself
> to add the new functions needed by WebKit. I'll send a pull request
> with it in the near future.
> 
> The same for preferences goes here -- we can mostly keep these
> functions unimplemented and assume the default. These are particularly
> needed by JavaScriptCore.

Note that the POSIX 2008 xlocale extensions (which are now widely supported 
because the locale stuff in C++11 is ) were designed by Apple to implement most 
of this functionality in libc, so they should be relatively easy to implement 
now.  It would actually be very nice to reimplement a bunch of the NSLocale 
stuff in terms of locale_t as well now.

David