Wekkly Update

Sun, 09 Jul 2000 20:39:46 -0700 

now at http://www.gnustep.org

Week ending 8 July 2000

The Distributed Objects code in gstep-base has been largely rewritten to be much more compatible with MacOS-X (and incidentally, closer to the original OpenStep standard).

This code has now reached a point of (some) stability, so that it is now the default implementation, but you can change the value of the GS_NEW_DO preprocessor definition in Makefile.preamble to build with the old stable implementation (though not 100% compatibile with the old implementation).

Please do not attempt to use this CVS code in a production environment without extensive testing. However, I do encourage you to use the new DO code in all other circumstances.

The main features of the new implementation are -

  • DO should work between processors with different architectures/word sizes
  • DO might work for inter-thread communication
  • Benchmarks indicate a possible 25% performance improvement
  • You can add authentication/encryption to data passing over DO
  • A deadlock condition is avoided.
  • MacOS-X compatibility
The main disadvantages are -
  • Relatively untested
  • On a multi-threaded system on GNU/Linux, you need a recent copy of the objc runtime that fixes lock deallocation bugs in the latest official egcs release.
gstep-base (Foundation)
  • NSString - initWithFormat:locale: implemented
  • New OPENSTEP string constants added.
  • More MS-Windows support improvements.
  • Minor bugfixes in coding/archiving classes.
  • Masses of Distributed Objects changes.
  • Documentation for the NSConnection class added.
gstep-gui (AppKit frontend)
  • Now installs GSFontInfo.h header file
  • GSServicesManager, gpbs - updated for OpenStep compatible DO
gstep-xgps (AppKit backend)
  • gpbs - updated for OpenStep compatible DO 
Week ending 8 July 2000

The Distributed Objects code in gstep-base has been largely rewritten to be
much more compatible with MacOS-X (and incidentally, closer to the original
OpenStep standard).

This code has now reached a point of (some) stability, so that it is now the
default implementation, but you can change the value of the GS_NEW_DO
preprocessor definition in Makefile.preamble to build with the old stable
implementation (though not 100% compatibile with the old implementation).

Please do not attempt to use this CVS code in a production
environment without extensive testing.  However, I do encourage you to use the
new DO code in all other circumstances.

The main features of the new implementation are -

DO should work between processors with different architectures/word sizes
DO might work for inter-thread communication
Benchmarks indicate a possible 25% performance improvement
You can add authentication/encryption to data passing over DO
A deadlock condition is avoided.
MacOS-X compatibility

The main disadvantages are -

Relatively untested
On a multi-threaded system on GNU/Linux, you need a recent copy of the
objc runtime that fixes lock deallocation bugs in the latest official egcs
release.



gstep-base (Foundation)


NSString - initWithFormat:locale: implemented
New OPENSTEP string constants added.
More MS-Windows support improvements.
Minor bugfixes in coding/archiving classes.
Masses of Distributed Objects changes.
Documentation for the NSConnection class added.


gstep-gui (AppKit frontend)


Now installs GSFontInfo.h header file
GSServicesManager, gpbs - updated for OpenStep compatible DO


gstep-xgps (AppKit backend)


gpbs - updated for OpenStep compatible DO

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