Re: The need for a libobjc maintainer

[Timothy J. Wood]

On Friday, October 31, 2003, at 11:26  AM, Ziemowit Laski wrote:
> Yes, absolutely.  It would be good to have one maintainer who actually 
> lives on the GNU runtime day-to-day, and then another who has exposure 
> to the Darwin side of things (esp. differences between the GNU and 
> NeXT runtimes).  So, if Nicola agrees to run for office :-), I'm 
> definitely for nominating both him and Andrew.

  Just commenting as a very interested bystander, so feel free to 
ignore me if I'm being an idiot, but ... it would be even better to 
have a pair of maintainers, GNUstep and Darwin that were committed to 
(a) LGPL-ing the Apple runtime (possibly dual license with APSL), (b) 
merging the runtimes and (c) simplifying the objc compiler bits by 
getting rid of the -ffoo-runtime switch.

  I know this is probably wishful thinking on my part (backwards 
compatibility, Apple legal issues, practical and philosophical 
differences on whether __builtin_apply is better than assembly 
messengers, runtime+crt0 initialization issues), but I can't help but 
worry that the runtimes are going to continue diverging and maintenance 
is only going to get harder.

  A guy can dream, can't he?  :)

  I did some work a while back to take a MinGW release and the Darwin 
ObjC runtime and get MinGW produce output for the Darwin runtime and 
then modified the Darwin runtime to work on Win32/x86 (not too hard 
since the x86 messenger code is already there).  I know this is a very 
small step in the grand scheme of things, but if anyone is interested 
in the bits, I can put them up somewhere (they are fairly old at this 
point, though much should remain the same).

-tim