How Many Runtimes Are there?
If you have used Objective-C on Mac OS X, then you will have used one or both of Apple’s two Objective-C runtimes. The Apple legacy runtime is based on the version implemented by NeXT back in the ’80s, although it has seen some improvements since that time and is often referred to as the NeXT runtime. Apple’s modern runtime is a complete rewrite, introduced with OS X 10.5. The modern runtime is required for Objective-C 2 and is the default on 64-bit platforms. The implementation of Objective-C produced by NeXT was based on GCC and as such NeXT was required to release the relevant compiler changes. The NeXT Objective-C runtime was not open sourced (it was later, after Apple bought NeXT, but the code is not particularly portable and so is not used on platforms other than Darwin) and so the GNU project created a new one, generally referred to as the GNU runtime. In 2009, a fork of this was committed to GNUstep subversion repository as libobjc2. This contains a lot of new features and remo
Related Questions
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