Re: CoreBase: necessary additions for WebKit

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

> On 2 Jul 2017, at 10:07, David Chisnall <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> On 1 Jul 2017, at 22:51, Daniel Ferreira (theiostream) <address@hidden> wrote:
>> 
>> This would require rewriting a good part of CFRunLoop, but it seems
>> more approachable than expecting Base's NSRunLoop to depend on
>> libdispatch.
> 
> Note that an increasing amount of Cocoa code depends on at least the main 
> runloop having a libdispatch queue, and libdispatch runs on all 
> GNUstep-supported platforms (including Windows - there are multiple ports, 
> and Microsoft maintains one, though I also talked to that team a few months 
> ago about reimplementing the libdispatch APIs on top of the Windows 
> concurrency primitives).

While, for many years, GNUstep has had a policy of minimising external 
dependencies (because a common complaint was that it was difficult to install, 
and we wanted to minimise instrallation problems), I really don't like sending 
time working on or maintaining code when someons else is doing it and we can 
leverage their work.

In that spirit, I'm very much in favour of using libdispatch where it's 
available and as efficient as (or better than) existing code. Of course using 
it without breaking existing code may be a challenge...  In particular I worry 
about breakage on windows since libdispatch, like the I/O and event APIs in 
Foundation, was not designed with portability to windows in mind.  It's good to 
hear that windows ports exist.