Re: [bug #4189] broken bycopy in DO

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Friday, July 4, 2003, at 12:45  pm, Alexander Malmberg wrote:

> [snip]
> > Changes by: Richard Frith-Macdonald <rfm@gnu.org>
> > Date: Fri 07/04/2003 at 10:21 (GMT)
> >
> >             What     | Removed                   | Added
> > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> > -----
> >             Severity | 7                         | 1 - Ordinary
>
> Why was the severity of this changed?

An infrequent problem with a trivial workaround which is already the
officially recommended (ie in the NeXT/Apple dlocumentation)
way of doing things.

> [snip]
> > 4. DO kewords like bycopy and byref are only meaningful in protocols  
> > (they
> > are ignored in class interfaces and implementations) ... so the bycopy
> > return value on the server side must be declared in a protocol to  
> > which the
> > class of the server instance conforms.
>
> This doesn't make any sense to me. Why shouldn't these keywords work
> without protocols?

No good reason ... other than that the language spec does not day they
are meaningful in interface/implementation, and the compiler doesn't
put them in the type information the runtime uses to build classes ...  
so
if you declare -(id bycopy)foo; in an interface or implementation, then
look at the structures the compiler generates, you will find that the  
type
info is @@:  rather than the O@@: you might expect.

> After updating -base with this fix, just about every single GNUstep
> program now dumps core (at start, or very soon after starting). After
> digging around a bit, it turns out that -base is now incompatible with
> gcc <3.3, and I'm using 3.2.

I can't think of any obvious reason for that ... presumably a bug in the
earlier compiler, in which case we will need a workaround.

> Although I can understand that supporting
> broken compilers can be difficult or impossible, suddenly requiring 3.3
> without any discussion or warning doesn't seem very nice.

I don't think stefan urbanek is saying we should require 3.3