Re: GNUstep on Darwin!

[David Ayers]

Hello John

John Davidorff Pell wrote:

> After someone competent becomes the maintainer of the GNU runtime, and 
> re-enables it on darwin, then maybe.

I believe it was more of lack of willingness/time than a lack of 
competence.  Note that currently all active Objective-C maintainers are 
Apple employees.  This may change in the very near future, and even 
Andrew (who I believe is also an Apple employee) has stated he was 
willing to actually do work for the GNU runtime on exactly that issue.  
This problem has long been discussed, but to no satisfactory end so 
far.  There are even proposed patches that implement something similar 
to what Bill Northcott mentioned.  Please see: 
http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=11572

> Maybe we should look to making GNUstep less dependent on the GNU runtime?

We already try and are willing to consider further patches.  Please take 
a look at:
Headers/Additions/GNUstepBase
objc-gnu2next.h
GSObjCRuntime.[hm]

But also note that DO (which is needed for the paste board server (read 
-gui/AppKit), distributed notification center and....) currently doesn't 
work.  Maybe because Apple's runtime doesn't provide us with the hooks 
used by ffcall/libffi invocation (see __objc_msg_forward).  I'm not sure 
if that is the current issue or whether it has to do with typed 
selectors or something completely different.

It will take someone who is familiar with -base, has access to Darwin 
and Apple runtime know-how to get this running.  I'm sure there are 
people with the capabilities but it seems non-trivial and you'll need to 
find some able to invest the time.  We would really appreciate patches.

Take into consideration that many GNUstep developers do not use OS X or 
Darwin as their primary plattform (many of us don't even have access to 
either).  But some of us are willing to work together with those who 
have access to get things working.  If anyone would be willing to invest 
money on the getting this done, I'm sure you will find more people on 
this list willing to dig into it.  But there is a good chance that you 
may still need a patched Apple runtime.

Cheers,
David