4 ms·

GCC's C is emphatically not "plain" (ANSI/ISO) C, but that does not mean it isn't "portable" C, given that GCC itself targets many platforms, and other compiler

GCC's C is emphatically not "plain" (ANSI/ISO) C, but that does not mean it isn't "portable" C, given that GCC itself targets many platforms, and other compilers (clang, at least) do attempt to support GCC's dialect.

DHowett 10y ago
I couldn't find documentation that supports Clang offering the __builtin_apply intrinsics, but their availability would make a C objc_msgSend somewhat more palatable.
- groovy2shoes 10y ago
  Ah. I don't mean to be too argumentative. You've helped me to understand why objc_msgSend() could not be done in standard C, and I thank you for that :) However, in the case of GCC's ObjC implementation, I don't see why it couldn't be implemented in GCC's dialect, thus obviating any need for assembly. Pardon me while I reflect on (and lament) the fact that we're still stuck using such crude and ancient tools for systems programming...
  - lilyball 10y ago
    FWIW, it appears that Mulle-objc gets around this by actually changing the calling convention for Obj-C methods, so the IMP takes a single parameter (beyond self and _cmd) which is a struct that contains all of the method parameters. This way the compiler can just synthesize the struct for you, and then objc_msgSend() itself can be written in C because it just needs to pass the pointer to the struct along to the IMP rather than messing about with forwarding arbitrary arguments.
    - groovy2shoes 10y ago
      Interesting. Thanks!