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Compilers, Runtimes, and Web Apps

Posted on 19 November 2009 by David Chisnall

As regular readers will know, as well as hacking on Étoilé, I also maintain the GNUstep Objective-C runtime and associated support in clang. Recently, I started working on something that we discussed at the hackathon: web app integration.

Étoilé has lots of features that would make it convenient for writing web applications. The EtoileUI framework, for example, lets you specify user interfaces in quite an abstract way. We would like, for example, to be able to take the EtoileUI tree and turn this into a tree of web-based views, just as we currently turn it into a tree of AppKit views. This would make it trivial for all Étoilé user interfaces to have an 'export to web' menu button, so when you are away from your computer you can press this button and access your Étoilé programs from a remote browser.

With this support, it might also be nice to be able to write stand-alone web applications with Étoilé. That's more or less what I've been working on for the last week or so. I now have a set of classes that talk FastCGI to a web server and handle events and session management. This will be used to construct a set of MVC views that can be used from EtoileUI or directly.

While I was working on it, I got a bit bored writing accessor methods, so I decided to use clang, which supports declared properties. I've also been using the GNUstep runtime on my own machine for a while. When using clang, it made sense to use the new non-fragile ABI supported by this runtime.

Of course, doing so immediately broke everything. After a bit of bug fixing, in both clang and the runtime, I got the code working with the new ABI. This properly supports properties, non-fragile instance variables, and fast forwarding, among other improvements.

Clang is now able to compile most of Étoilé with the new ABI. This is backwards compatible with the old one, so you can still link against libraries (like GNUstep, which uses @defs and so doesn't support the non-fragile ABI) compiled with the GCC ABI. There are a few more bugs to fix, but then we should be able to fully support clang as a compiler for Étoilé. In the meantime, the GNUstep runtime is working as a drop-in replacement for the GCC runtime.