Re: random gnustep/objc questions

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Wednesday, December 5, 2001, at 02:06 AM, Jay McCarthy wrote:

> i am working on porting something and i have some questions:
>
> 1) are functions from objc/objc-api.h made by GNUstep? I know they are
> present in libobjc - but the version of gcc i use (gcc 3) also has this
> header so i do not install libobjc. If they are owned by GNUstep - are
> there plans to implement methods like:
>         class_nextMethodList
>         objc_getClasses
>         etc

No they aren't made by GNUstep.

>  if this is not the case then do any GNUstep/Objc coders know of ways to
> do similiar things?

Both versions of the objc runtime have similar capabilities.
Apple say you shouldn't use the objc runtime stuff directly in MacOS-X
I think we really say the same, there has been some work done to create
a set of macros and functions to hide runtime differences, but it's far
from complete ... what there is is in NSObjCRuntime.[hm] in the GNUstep
base library.

2) other functions which are similiar to the above are those functions
> in objc/HashTable.h that are not implemented but used in some apps i'm
> porting:
>         NSInitHashState
>         NSNextHashState
>
>  my question is the same for these but I also have another side question
> to go along with it, is GNUstep's NSHashTable the same (or more) than
> the NSHashTable of objc/HashTable.h ?

I think NSHashTable has a superset of the functionality in the runtime.


In general, you shouldn't use runtime functions or depend on runtime data
structures unless you really, really have to - they are liable to change
without notice.  So you should rewrite to use OpenStep functions where
possible.

However, if you really *do* need to use the runtime directly, the
GNUstep guile and java interface libraries probably provide examples
of using the gnu runtime to do anything you might want.