Re: Mac OS-compatible ports

[David De La Harpe Golden]

On 01/01/12 07:02, YAMAMOTO Mitsuharu wrote:

> For example, Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) I mentioned in the
> `select' emulation without periodic polling is a C API and
> provided by both Mac OS X and iOS, but not by GNUstep.

libdispatch itself is, however, Apache 2.0 licensed,
and has been ported to gnu+linux and packaged for debian/unstable

http://packages.debian.org/sid/libdispatch0
http://chris.mowforth.com/installing-grand-central-dispatch-on-linux

I haven't tried it, but the in-development ObjC2 runtime for GNUstep
reportedly had its own "toylibdispatch" implementation it uses, and 
maybe can now use the "real" one above with some hacking, based on this 
ticket:

http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?34627

But it's all a bit bleeding edge, stable GNUstep doesn't support blocks 
and stuff yet.  Apart from that, note this stuff reportedly currently 
requires clang rather than gcc at present.

http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/ObjC2_FAQ#Which_Runtime_Should_I_use.3F

But anyway, still, I'd be wary of some "GNUstep doesn't support" claims, 
they may just be "Stable release of GNUstep doesn't support" or "GNUstep 
doesn't support yet".

I think it really would be a shame to break emacs GNUstep compat, 
especially as it's clear from the above the GNUstep project is making 
strong efforts to keep up with apple's modernisations (whatever your 
opinion of apple as a company, purely technically I think most people 
would agree objc2 blocks etc. are a really good thing for objc...). 
Though maybe there could be greater separation in the code paths in 
emacs, say separate 'gnustep and 'macosx window systems rather than a 
unified 'ns, despite the seemingly large overlap.