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I'd like to ask if gnustep's toolchain is appropriate for netbsd development where one'd normally use plain C. I'm interested in the benefits of Obj-C only with basic APIs like NSObject's reference counting and dynamic stuff.

My question is twofold:

  • is gcc's Obj-C ABI compatible with gcc's C ABI? so that I can use regular C libraries
  • is Obj-C's runtime layer good to go where netbsd targets embedded?

Thank you in advance!

rostamn739
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    If you are only interested in the basic API, you might be better off to just grab the Objective-C runtime and build the other Classes from the foundation framework yourself. The Core Foundation counterparts are open source as well, so you can get a reference implementation from there. – JustSid Dec 08 '12 at 16:36
  • @JustSid that's lovely :) didn't know that in advance bcos I'm not an apple enthusiast – rostamn739 Dec 08 '12 at 16:38

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is gcc's Obj-C ABI compatible with gcc's C ABI? so that I can use regular C libraries?

This has nothing to do with the ABI at first glance. Objective-C is a strict superset of C, so it's true on every platform that you can use C code with Objective-C code. You can even call Objective-C methods from plain C code using the Objective-C runtime library.

is Obj-C's runtime layer good to go where netbsd targets embedded?

I don't exactly see what the question is here. Are you asking whether it is possible to port GNUstep to embedded platforms? If so, I'd say yes, it should normally be possible (with the appropriate constraints of an embedded system), but in my opinion, it's too heavyweight for embedded development.

  • Thank you, that seems adequate :) Is your opinion mentioned last based on that GNUStep aims to port the whole Cocoa? My question is only about the susbset of GNUStep that allows me to do basic Obj-C.. – rostamn739 Dec 08 '12 at 16:36
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    @rostamn739 no, not the whole Cocoa, just Foundation. And basically that's quite large itself. You can have the Objective-C runtime separately, but then you have to reimplement all the useful base classes (have a clue on how to make NSMutableDictionary?), so probably you don't want that. –  Dec 08 '12 at 16:48
  • @H2CO3 GNUStep includes parts of AppKit and other Frameworks (like Core Data) as well. – JustSid Dec 08 '12 at 19:20
  • @JustSid Yes, correct. But it's still not the whole Cocoa API :) Nevertheless, it's huge and bloated. (There are projects that aim to provide a feature-complete port of the whole Cocoa and Cocoa Touch (!) API, like Cocotron, but they're even bigger.) –  Dec 08 '12 at 19:36
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If you aren't interested by AppKit, you may also take a look at https://webkeks.org/objfw/. Runtimes may contain assembly bits that you will want to verify that they will actually work on specific CPU type. Old Foundation library like libFoundation may also suite your needs. If you want to use thing like Objective-C++ or Objective-C 2.0, I'd recommend clang instead of gcc.

Fred Frith-MacDonald
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