Re: Making MTA using ObjC

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Friday, February 9, 2001, at 06:01 AM, Sungjin Chun wrote:

> Hi, 
>  
> I want to know whether making MTA(Mail Transfer Agent,  
> like sendmail, postfix, qmail and etc) using ObjC, ie.  
> gnustep-base. Some of my co-worker says it's very 
> unreasonable thing to do; because ObjC is not fast enough 
> to do this kind of thing. Any comment and/or suggestion? 

Well, if ObjC is not fast enough, neither is C ...

In fact I wrote an MTA using ObjC, and used it as the mail gateway
for our company for a few years.  It's now used internally for some
specialised tasks, and we use postfix for our main gateway ... I didn't
have time to continue to maintain it.


If speed is your primary objective, you need careful design whatever
language you use.  In ObjC I'd advise against using NSString too much
(perhaps parse the headers into NSStrings, but not the bodies of messages).

The GSMime classes in gnustep-base could be used for parsing ... I want to
get round to writing an unparser too at some point, but may not be
sufficiently lightweight for an MTA ... it's intended for use by mail clients
and web tools.

The SMTP stuff is easily implemented using NSFileHandle.