Re: Google SoC

[David Chisnall]

Hi Keith,


On 3 Apr 2008, at 12:08, Keith Duncan wrote:

> Having read through your list of ideas I'm most interested in  
> working on the CoreData implementation to gain a deeper  
> understanding of the framework.

Could be interesting for people porting applications from OS X.

> I've also been thinking about ideas not on the list, something that  
> I feel would be worthwhile would be updating the frameworks to  
> include some of the latest Leopard additions, ensuring that other  
> can continue to consult the framework implementations.

There are also quite a few of missing methods from Leopard and  
earlier.  Getting up to feature-parity with Leopard in Foundation and  
AppKit would be great, although probably more work than a summer  
project (NSOutlineView, for example, was heavily extended in Leopard).

> Another idea I considered was attempting to implement an Objective-C  
> 2.0 compatible runtime, essentially revamping the runtime modeled on  
> the work Apple has already done, though perhaps this is too great an  
> undertaking for one person?

I have already implemented a new runtime which is capable of  
supporting the features of Objective-C 2.0 and am currently in process  
of adding compiler support for it to LLVM.  Most of the features of  
Objective-C 2.0 are in the compiler, rather than the runtime (it's  
mostly syntactic sugar - although considering how bad most of it is  
syntactic salt might be a better term), so this is more of a compiler  
project than a GNUstep one.  The GCC team might be interested in a  
project to port these things from the Apple branch to trunk.

> Before applying I would like to ask about the front/backend  
> separation and to what extend it will influence the code I would be  
> writing.

Back provides a DPS-like interface to -gui.  It is very unlikely that  
your code will touch back at all.

> As far as I can tell this applies only to drawing code,  
> understandably the code needs to run on multiple platforms. I'm  
> assuming the ideas I have discussed are in the domain of the  
> frontend code, except maybe the new runtime implementation? The  
> reason I ask is that I only have access to a 32 bit Intel Mac OS  
> 10.5 development environment and as such, I wouldn't be able to test  
> any WIN32 based backend. I do hope this doesn't preclude me from  
> applying.

I hope you intend to run some other OS inside a VM for development, if  
this is the case, since GNUstep does not currently work on Leopard.

David