On 23 Nov 2007, at 16:00, Quentin Mathé wrote:

> Le 22 nov. 07 à 17:58, David Chisnall a écrit :
>
>> On 22 Nov 2007, at 16:51, Jesse Ross wrote:
>>
>>>> - New runtime
>>
>> I'd rather postpone this until after FOSDEM.
>
> Ah ok. I thought you were going to try to finish a first prototype :-)
> May it's more reasonable, yet it could be interesting to discuss it at
> FOSDEM (perhaps in a dev room talk).

I was planning on doing giving it one or two minutes in the 'future  
work' section in FOSDEM and see if there are any GCC or LLVM  
developers around I can persuade to get involved.  The current status  
of the new runtime is:

- Works
- Passes tests
- Documented
- Needs compiler support

I took a look at the GCC back-end for Objective-C.  It's about 10K  
lines of code in a single file (nice).  While it's fairly simple to  
make it support the new runtime, it's a lot of fairly simple work.   
Once that's done, there will need to be a few changes to GNUstep (a  
few NSObject/NSInvocation methods) to support it, which I'm happy to  
make.  If LLVM is simpler than GCC to support then I'd advocate going  
that route and making LLVM the officially supported compiler for  
Étoilé (because, let's face it, LLVM is damn shiny and makes GCC look  
quite archaic in comparison).  This is a nontrivial undertaking,  
however, and unless a few LLVM people jump on board and do most of the  
work for me, there is no way we will have it working by FOSDEM, so I  
propose it takes a back seat until after FOSDEM / 0.3 so I can  
concentrate on making things we can do shiny demoes of (i.e.  
CoreObject) work.

I think we are likely to get JavaScript and Io support on it before  
Objective-C at the moment.  If we are going the LLVM route then I will  
probably modify my current Smalltalk code to emit LLVM bytecode  
instead of using Lightning and then we can have Smalltalk (and  
possibly Self, as Self is also very shiny) support too.  All of these  
things I suggest go in the future work section of our FOSDEM  
presentation.

David
_______________________________________________
Etoile-dev mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-dev

Reply via email to