Re: Some GNUstep discussions in other forums

[Bertrand Dekoninck]

Le 26 déc. 18 à 12:53, David Chisnall a écrit :

> On 25 Dec 2018, at 18:30, Bertrand Dekoninck <bertrand.dekoninck@gmail.com 
> > wrote:
> >         - port rik to objc1 and have it  up-to-date on ppc.
>
> Is this really a good use of your time?  One of the problems with  
> GNUstep is the perception that we’re stuck with a 30-year-old  
> framework and a 20-year-old version of a language (which is somewhat  
> dated even in its latest incarnation).  If you care about PowerPC,  
> why not work on supporting a modern Objective-C dialect on PowerPC,  
> rather than on rewriting everything that you want to use in an  
> archaic one?

Obviously. But, the last time I did try to have it work on ppc, I had  
been stuck and I don't have the knowledge to debug it.
Porting to objc1 is a way to learn both the ancient and the new  
dialects. I've already achieve to understand a few little bits of the  
language I didn't understand before.

Moreover, GNUstep is stuck on the gcc runtime on several platforms. As  
far as I know, debian and windows (at least the installer given on  
gnustep's website) still use it.
I'm a little reluctant to reinstall Freebsd ppc64 to test if gnustep  
builds fine : the last time I did, one of my cpus died during the  
(long) build of xorg. Do you know if anyone succeeded in building  
gnustep on this platform ?



> As far as I know, clang should be able to target PowerPC and  
> libobjc2 should run happily on PowerPC (though will be missing  
> objc_msgSend and imp_implementationWithBlock unless someone wants to  
> contribute the PowerPC assembly versions - they’re not that hard if  
> you know the target assembly,

I don't. And I don't think I could learn one. I didn't find so much  
info on the net about this. The texts I had found on the net are way  
too hard to understand for me.


> but I have no interest in PowerPC so no motivation to learn another  
> new ISA just to write a couple of dozen lines of code for it).


I understand this.  I had already thought to ask on the debian ppc  
list, but the few people there are too busy trying to keep the port  
alive.

Bertrand