GNU runtime on Darwin/MacOS X

[Bill Northcott]

Maybe amid all this joy about using the GNU runtime on Darwin/MacOS X, I 
may inject a note of caution.

There is a big downside to using the GNU runtime - you cannot send a 
message to any object built on the Next/Apple runtime.  So your GNU 
runtime app is completely isolated from all the system Objective-C.

We had a lot of discussion about this in the Swarm project.  We can build 
our code, which runs on the GNU runtime, using an Apple compiler with the 
11754 patch (contributed by Andrew Pinski).  The resulting code runs 
without problems.

However, we only see this as a halfway house.  The real aim is to get rid 
of the runtime dependencies in our code.  That way we can benefit from 
Apple's code and tools.  The more non-standard stuff (compilers, runtimes 
etc) that your package requires, the harder it is to build and the smaller 
your user base.

After all Apple have many development dollars to spend on their runtime 
and libraries.  What is the user base for the GNU runtime?  Does it make 3 
digits?

Bill Northcott