A new objective-c runtime: from research to production

Аннотация

On my way out of academia, before Cambridge persuaded me to return, the last paper I wrote was a description of a new Objective-C runtime for use by the Étoilé project. An Objective-C implementation requires two components: a runtime library that implements the dynamic parts of the language and a compiler that emits calls to this library. When I wrote that paper in 2009, there were two choices for Objective-C: Apple’s stack, with a number of new features but an implementation that relied september 2012 | vol. 55 | no. 9 | communications of the acm 45 limitations. Smalltalk is a simple language—created as a bet that one could fully specify a useful language on a single piece of paper—with an object model similar to Objective-C. A Smalltalk implementation therefore provided a relatively simple demonstration that it is possible to support other languages with the shared object model.