ANN: Libobjc2 1.3

[David Chisnall]

Since both the new GNUstep and new LLVM releases have been tagged, and I said 
I'd do a new release of the runtime before either, I thought I'd better get 
around to actually pushing the release.  A few people to thank in this one:

Banlu, for making the insane decision to use Objective-C++ in his project, 
motivating me to make sure that Objective-C++ actually worked.  This is also 
why the new GNUstep-base release properly calls C++ constructors and 
destructors in Objective-C ivars and why clang 2.9 correctly generates the 
support code for them.

Sebastian, for his help finding a few bugs - testing with OpenBSD's paranoid 
system is a good way of turning intermittent failures into consistent crashes.

Niels, for adding the alias table and the third-chance lookup mechanism for 
implementing aliases.  This is going to come in handy with UIKit, but may also 
be useful to people using things like GNUstepWeb / SOPE.  Thanks also to Niels 
for his various random fixes.

David

GNUstep Objective-C Runtime 1.3
===============================

This is the fourth official release of the GNUstep Objective-C runtime (a.k.a.
libobjc2).  This runtime was designed to support the features of Objective-C 2
for use with GNUstep and other Objective-C programs.

This release contains several bug fixes and includes a unified exception
model, providing the same features as Apple's Modern runtime for Objective-C++
code, specifically the ability to throw Objective-C objects with @throw() or
throw() and catch them with @catch() or catch().  The new unified exception
model is supported by Clang 2.9 and is compatible with Apple's Objective-C++
exception behaviour.  Another enhancement in this release is the addition of
support for class aliases.  This provides a run-time equivalent of
@compatibility_alias, allowing a class to show up in class lookup searching for
its alias.

You may obtain the code for this release from subversion at the following
subversion branch:

svn://svn.gna.org/svn/gnustep/libs/libobjc2/1.3

Alternatively, a tarball is available from:

http://download.gna.org/gnustep/libobjc2-1.3.tar.bz2

The runtime library is responsible for implementing the core features of the
object model, as well as exposing introspection features to the user.  The
GNUstep runtime implements Apple's Objective-C Runtime APIs, and a small number
of GCC APIs for legacy compatibility.

This library is based on the Étoilé Objective-C Runtime, an earlier research
prototype, and includes support for non-fragile instance variables,
type-dependent dispatch, and object planes.  It is fully compatible with the
FSF's GCC Objective-C ABI and also implements a new ABI that is supported by
Clang and Étoilé's LanguageKit and is required for some of the newer features.

Although the runtime has been tested by several people, and is being used
extensively by the Étoilé project, it is entirely new (MIT licensed) code and
may still contain bugs.  If you come across any problems, please report them to
the GNUstep Developer mailing list <gnustep-dev@gnu.org>.  

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