ObjC, CORBA, IDL, GNUstep

[Igor Khavkine]

Hi, I read about the CORBA compilance goal, in the roadmap page
on gnustep.org. Since most of GNU step is written in ObjC, then
you'd have to provide an IDL to ObjC mapping. For the most part
this is quite feasible since they follow similar OO approaches.
However there is extra functionality in OMG's IDL that does not
map directly to ObjC. For example, foreward declaring interfaces
and using namespaces (i.e. modules in IDL). Both of these
problems can be worked around, but these two features are present
in almost all modern OO languages. I know that ObjC hasen't
changed in a long time, but why not make a change now
and introduce these features. Namespaces are not that necessary
but it would be nice, but not being able to foreward declare
@protocols (to which IDL interfaces otherwise map directly) is
quite annoying.

I know that at the moment there is two major ObjC runtimes, the GNU
one and the NeXT one (now controlled by Apple). If the two parties
come to agreement on this the the change could be introduced
seamlessly. And none of the old code would be broken by this change
in the slightest.

Any ideas? I know that a couple of people that have worked on the
GNU ObjC runtime also contribute to GNUstep.

Igor