Re: Creating a GNUstep desktop on Solaris

[Andreas Höschler]

Hi Adam,

> > I'm rather new to Objective-C and Cocoa/GNUStep programming, but is 
> > this the standard behavior?
> >
> > I thought, that messages sent to nil objects should be silently 
> > ignored by the Objective-C runtime system. Am I missing something?
> Yes it is standard behavior, and ObjC does ignore a message to a nil 
> object and just returns 'NULL'. The problem is Solaris chokes when you 
> try to assign a 'NULL' to a structure. Even this should crash Solaris 
> (if you could actually compile it, which you can't since the compiler 
> is smart enough for this):
>
> struct foo {int i; int j;};
>
> struct foo bar;
>
> bar = (struct foo)0;

Haven't tried to compile this example on the Solaris yet, however I 
would consider the above code to be illegal, whether this works on some 
platforms or not. Assign Null to a structure simply makes no sence. I 
would expect that the compiler, or if it goes through the runtime does 
not know how to handle this.

It sounds like you mean mean that TextEdit.app and also GNUMail.app do 
crash on Solaris because of this problem. Well, I successfully compiled 
both on Solaris. So the compiler is not preventing the problem by 
refusing to compile the code.

IMHO this should be fixed in the TextEdit.app and GNUMail.app sources 
and coders should make sure to always check a pointer for NULL before 
assigning it to a struc, shouldn't they?

Regards,

   Andreas