If you had money to place for a bounty, what would you choose?

[Michel Fortin]

On 2013-11-29 14:08:25 +0000, Manu <turkeyman at gmail.com> said:

> On 29 November 2013 23:27, Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com> wrote:
> 
>> Binary compatibility with Objective-C:
>> 
>> http://michelf.ca/projects/d-objc/
> 
> I've been very excited about this for a long time... why is it sitting in
> limbo?
> How is the implementation? Is there a reason nobody seems to be actually
> considering it for inclusion?
> OSX/iOS are 2 very important platforms, and I too would really love to see
> movement on this work.

If I were Walter, I wouldn't accept it in the state it is currently in. 
The missing support for the modern runtime makes it look like a 
gimmick, as the legacy runtime is dead end (Apple is already dropping 
32-bit support with new OS X frameworks). And no ARC makes it look bad 
compared to regular Objective-C. Lacking support for Objective-C 
categories and for blocks is also problematic.

I'm no longer working on D/Objective-C. And while Jacob has updated it 
to a more modern incarnation of DMD, it's just the minimum to keep it 
afloat. What this project need is sustained development for I don't 
know how many months.

The implementation is quite good, in my opinion. But then I'm the one 
who wrote it. ;-) The important thing to keep in mind is that this is a 
huge and far reaching changeset. It adds things in the parser, in the 
semantic phase, in code generation, in the back end, and in the 
runtime. It's full of internal design decisions which I didn't really 
discuss much with anyone, in most part because most people here are not 
familiar enough with Objective-C (be it the language, its runtime or 
its compiled representation) to know what to do. There's also some 
reverse engineering work to figure out the correct output for compiled 
code, as this is not much documented.

Honestly, this thing is not mere bounty material, it'd be worthy to be 
a Kickstarter project for about a full year of development time.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca