Tentative Objective-C Runtime Release Plan

[David Chisnall]

Hello,

It has been a very long time since the 1.8 release of the runtime and there 
have been a lot of changes.  My current plan is to do a 1.9 release soon, 
shortly followed by a 2.0 release.

The 1.9 release wraps up all of the bug fixes and performance improvements from 
the last couple of years.

The 2.0 release is a much larger change.  It introduces the new ABI and moves 
to using the new ABI for its internal data structures (dynamically updating 
older ABI structures on load).  The new ABI is designed for forward 
compatibility, making it comparatively easy to extend any of the introspection 
structures in future versions.

I have submitted an initial cut at compiler support for clang for review:

https://reviews.llvm.org/D46052

I would encourage everyone to grab the experimental clang and libobjc2 trees 
and try compiling with -fobjc-runtime=gnustep-2.0:

https://github.com/davidchisnall/clang-gnustep-abi-2
https://github.com/davidchisnall/libobjc2

David