[Pythonmac-SIG] [pyobjc] portability and clean starts (was:NSAutorelease support)

Steven D. Majewski sdm7g@virginia.edu
Wed, 8 Nov 2000 19:51:00 -0500 (EST)


On Wed, 8 Nov 2000, Bill Bumgarner wrote:

> AFAIK, Carbon on MacOS does not include ObjC-- so, no point in going to the  
> relatively primitive CoreFoundation API because it won't gain portability to  
> that environment and it will greatly impede portability to GnuStep/OpenStep....

My point is that portability w.r.t. GnuStep/OpenStep/NextStep/Cocoa/... 
is a different dimension than portability for 
	Darwin(including Darwin on Intel)/MacOSX/ClassicMac+CarbonLib.

There *MAY* be portability advantages (in that second dimension) to 
using the lower level and common (among that family) interfaces: 
more code to initially write, but less total code to support all
of those system. 

Supporting all the *Step flavors probably means more work, and it
becomes prohibitive if there aren't enough users, testers and 
maintainers. ( Isn't this why PyObjC was dropped from the Python
core distribution ? If there are a lot of Python + GnuStep users
lurking out there, please speak up! ) 

The main advantage of a clean start would seem to be to make a
clean start and get rid of a lot of untested #ifdef's . 


---|  Steven D. Majewski   (804-982-0831)  <sdm7g@Virginia.EDU>  |---
---|  Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics  |---
---|  University of Virginia             Health Sciences Center  |---
---|  P.O. Box 10011            Charlottesville, VA  22906-0011  |---
		"All operating systems want to be unix, 
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