Objective-C 2.0 and other new features in Leopard

[Gregory John Casamento]

All,

As many of you are probably aware, Apple released Leopard today.  
 Leopard contains a number of enhancements which are important to us, one of 
which is Objective-C 2.0. 

Objective-C 2.0
=====
Odds are the existing developers will still write for versions of Mac
 OS 10.4 and below in order to have the widest possible range of
 customers, but eventually Objective-C 2.0 *will* become the standard.   As more
 and more people upgrade this will become the case sooner rather than
 later.  The core libraries of GNUstep should remain ObjC "1.0" compatible for 
the forseeable future, but I believe we need to start talking to the people in 
the GCC project to determine
 how we can help with the implementation of a gnu runtime that works
 with the new version of the language. 

Interface Builder enhancements
=====
The other feature which is interesting in it is the ability of InterfaceBuilder 
to support multiple languages including Ruby.  The recursive descent parser I 
wrote for Gorm currently only handles Objective-C headers.  Additionally, 
Gorm's internal data structures are decoupled from the type of archive that is 
being saved or read, nib, or gorm.   When I added the nib support I rewrote 
nib/gorm support in both gui and in Gorm to support an architecture that allows 
classes which read/write different types of gui files to register themselves so 
that they would be considered when a gui model is loaded.

I am planning on moving Gorm to a more bundle/plugin oriented architecture in 
the future.   This has a number of implications:

Gorm will be able to:
1) parse multiple languages
2) generate multiple languages (for class files)
3) read/write any type of gui model for which it has a plugin available
    * gorm
    * nib
    * gmodel... etc

Regards,
--
Gregory Casamento -- OLC, Inc 
# GNUstep Chief Maintainer