Re: Compiling on Darwin

[Helge Hess]

On 04.11.2003, at 00:13, John Davidorff Pell wrote:
> How hard would it be to write a patch ourselves?

I think its pretty hard. One of the differences between the NeXT and 
the GNU runtime is that the NeXT runtime uses assembly for method 
dispatch (AFAIK). So I guess to do such a patch, you would need to be 
an expert in all the supported assembly languages ;-)

>  the NeXT runtime is open source (Even by GNU's definition!), its just 
> not GPL.

Well, given Apple's aggressive nature in protecting its IP, it may be 
somewhat dangerous for people working on the GNU runtime even to look 
at the NeXT runtime sources.
It would be best to get some official statement from Apple that their 
runtime is released under GPL+exception and that the runtimes are going 
to be merged. I would *love* to see that.

Greets,
  Helge