gnustep for netbsd

Question

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!

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.