Re: Objective-C programming

Richard Frith-Macdonald said the following on 9/30/2005 12:13 PM:
> On 2005-09-30 15:56:07 +0000 Mehul N. Sanghvi <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
> 
>> Gregory John Casamento said the following on 9/30/2005 9:08 AM:
>>> I heard of at least one person getting it to run under NetBSD on an 
>>> old (read
>>> 680x0) Mac w/ 16 MB of RAM.
>>>
>>> GJC
>>>
>>
>>
>> NetBSD/sparc64 though is another matter.  One of the dependent libraries
>> does not compile and therefore, neither does GNUstep.  This is for
>> gnustep-base, in the ffcall library.
> 
> Perhaps you can use ffi rather than ffcall ... it's an option at 
> configure time.
> 

As far as I can tell, there isn't a ffi library on NetBSD, at least I 
don't see on in /usr/pkgsrc.  Does it come as part of gnustep-base ?

>> Also, on NetBSD, there is something called gnustep-objc which according
>> to the description, is the GCC/GNUstep Objective-C runtime.  Is this 
>> something that I should have ?  Apparently all the functions have
>> their names changed to the GNU naming convention.  Should I use this
>> or the NeXT runtime ?   Do I even have that choice ?
> 
> No ... you need the gnu runtime ... there is no NeXT runtime for sparc64 
> afaik

My mistake in how I worded the above.  Here is what it says in the 
package description:

    "The runtime is modeled after the NeXT Objective C runtime. That is, 
most functions have the semantics as it is known from the NeXT.  The 
names, however, have changed.  All runtime API functions have names of 
lowercase letters and underscores as opposed to the 'traditional' mixed 
case names."

To me this means the following:

gnustep-base API           gnustep-objc API
----------------           ----------------
  GSAtomicMallocZone         gs_atomic_malloc_zone
  GSBreakTime                gs_break_time
  GSCurrentThread            gs_current_thread
  GSDebugSet                 gs_debug_set
  NSAllocateObject           ns_allocate_object
  NSCopyObject               ns_copy_object


Is my understanding correct ?  Is this what I want ?  Or should I just
install gnustep-base and gcc-objc and leave it at that (along with
gnustep-make) ?

Based on what folks have said here, I believe that as long as I have
gcc (with objc support), gnustep-make, and gnustep-base, I should be
just fine, yes ?

cheers,

      mehul

p.s. This seems to be only there on NetBSD, and not on Debian.  Using
      the packing list to look for files in Debian packages turned up
      nothing.  Also, a quick look around the GNUstep download area
      doesn't mention gnustep-objc although it seems to have come from
      GNUstep FTP site, as per the NetBSD Makefile
-- 
Mehul N. Sanghvi
email: [email protected]