On 2013-11-29 20:33, Michel Fortin wrote:
If I were Walter, I wouldn't accept it in the state it is currently in. The missing support for the modern runtime makes it look like a gimmick, as the legacy runtime is dead end (Apple is already dropping 32-bit support with new OS X frameworks). And no ARC makes it look bad compared to regular Objective-C. Lacking support for Objective-C categories and for blocks is also problematic.
The advantage of having it merged would be to avoid keeping the fork up to date. Although this might risk breaking it, don't know how complete the test suite is.
I'm no longer working on D/Objective-C. And while Jacob has updated it to a more modern incarnation of DMD, it's just the minimum to keep it afloat. What this project need is sustained development for I don't know how many months. The implementation is quite good, in my opinion. But then I'm the one who wrote it. ;-) The important thing to keep in mind is that this is a huge and far reaching changeset. It adds things in the parser, in the semantic phase, in code generation, in the back end, and in the runtime. It's full of internal design decisions which I didn't really discuss much with anyone, in most part because most people here are not familiar enough with Objective-C (be it the language, its runtime or its compiled representation) to know what to do. There's also some reverse engineering work to figure out the correct output for compiled code, as this is not much documented. Honestly, this thing is not mere bounty material, it'd be worthy to be a Kickstarter project for about a full year of development time.
This is most likely correct. -- /Jacob Carlborg
