Re: [Swarm-Support] x86_64 and message forwarding

[Marcus Daniels]

Bill Northcott wrote:
> I still have to get a clear picture in my head of which bits of the 
existing code do what at this level.  There seem to be chunks grafted in 
from other open source projects in which not all of the code is functional.

Swarm uses two features from mframe:  1) taking apart the call frame in 
DefObject.m's -forward:: implementation, and 2) augmenting method 
signatures with call frame location data.  If #1 can be done without 
guidance from #2, say by using ffcall's vacall, then 
mframe_build_signature is not needed, and thus mframe could be discarded 
(the only thing that makes Swarm's libobjc unique).

Other than that, Swarm includes ffcall's avcall, which is just a copy.  
One idea would be to depend on ffcall (or maybe gnustep) as a binary 
dependency (e.g. an RPM) in order to get both callout (e.g. avcall) and 
callin (vacall) features. And then rip out both avcall and libobjc from 
Swarm.  I worry that ffcall would be reliably packaged across platforms 
given it's very machine and operating system dependent nature, and that 
gnustep libraries would be packaged as binaries at all.

Marcus