Re: mulle-objc #MakeObjCGreatAgain

[David Chisnall]

On 2 Dec 2016, at 15:15, Edwin Ancaer <eancaer@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I humbly apologize. 
> 
> Would it be better if I rephrase as: 
> > And imagine that for a popular Linux distribution there is a packaged
> > version for GNUstep (base, make, gui & back) made with mulle-objc compiler  
> > and
> > mulle obj-c runtime 
> > And then again, imagine I packaged my application for this distribution, but
> > with the clang compiler/etoilé runtime;
> because if they do not cooperate, you're cutting in half instead of making 
> great, as far as I'm concerned.

I wrote an article for Communications of the ACM about why the Étoilé runtime 
was a dead end a few years ago (ACM Queue version is free to read):

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2331170

One of the main design goals for the GNUstep runtime was to be backwards 
compatible with the GCC runtime.  Any code compiled with GCC or old versions of 
clang will work with it (though the converse is not true - you can’t use a 
recent clang, use recent Objective-C features, and expect it to work with an 
old GCC runtime or an older version of the GNUstep runtime).  In contrast, the 
Mulle and Étoilé Objective-C runtimes defined a completely new ABI and, in a 
few places, different source-level constructs.  This means that they are not 
drop-in replacements for anything and you will need some source-level porting 
in a few places.

David