Re: GNUstep Projects and Cambridge

[David Chisnall]

On 25 Jun 2013, at 03:21, "Lundberg, Johannes" 
<johannes@brilliantservice.co.jp> wrote:

> Hi
> 
> This sounds exciting but what does it really mean, put Objective-C in the 
> FreeBSD kernel? 

We plan on defining a slightly restricted subset of Objective-C (although I'm 
not sure exactly what we'll choose to sacrifice - maybe not much), and a 
runtime that better meets the constraints required for the kernel, then modify 
clang and LanguageKit to emit code compatible with this ABI.

> What is the goal?

To investigate the costs of putting an introspective high-level language in the 
kernel, which has traditionally been solely the domain of low-level languages.  
We'd also like to explore bridging the Objective-C object model with the ad-hoc 
C-based KObj object model that the rest of the kernel uses and see whether it's 
possible to seamlessly integrate the two. There's a reasonable amount of code 
in the kernel that is not CPU-bound.  I'd also like to explore using message 
sending at the language level as an alternative way for userspace code to 
interact with the kernel.  If it all works, I'd like to be able to use 
something like the demo that I gave at FOSDEM to have an environment where I 
can do live editing on Smalltalk code running in the kernel.

David

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