David Chisnall
| Event | Track | Day | Room | Start time | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LanguageKit - supporting Smalltalk and JavaScript dialects on the Objective-C runtime - what's hard, what's easy, and why developers and users should care. | World of GNUstep devroom | Saturday | AW1.117 | 14:15 | 00:30 |
| EtoileText | World of GNUstep devroom | Saturday | AW1.117 | 14:45 | 00:15 |
| Objective-C: Not just for Macs and iPhones | Languages Track | Sunday | Janson | 11:00 | 00:50 |
David Chisnall co-founded the Étoilé project while studying his PhD. This project aims to create a complete desktop environment built on top of the GNUstep frameworks, providing a document-centric interaction model.
As part of this project, he created LanguageKit, a framework for implementing dynamic languages sharing an object model with Objective-C. LanguageKit provides support for interpreting, as well as JIT and static compiling dynamic languages, and is currently used by Étoilé to provide implementations of dialects of Smalltalk and JavaScript.
Also as part of the Étoilé project, he is also responsible for implementing a generic object (and change) serialisation framework using Objective-C
runtime metadata, a transparent implementation of futures for concurrency, and the Étoilé XMPP framework.
While working on Étoilé, he gradually became more involved with GNUstep. His contributions include reimplementing the thread-related classes and numerous additions for OS X 10.6 compatibility, including NSCache, fast enumeration support, and various methods that make use of blocks. He is also
the author of the GNUstep Objective-C Runtime, which provides support for Objective-C 2 features on non-Apple platforms.
He became involved with Clang after being frustrated with the lack of support for Objective-C 2 in GCC. He wrote the code generation parts and a few bits of the front end for supporting the GCC Objective-C runtime, and later for supporting the GNUstep runtime, in clang.
He has mentored three students through Google's Summer of Code, most recently a project to implement Apple's CoreGraphics APIs on top of Cairo. He is the author of The Definitive Guide to the Xen Hypervisor, Cocoa Programming: Developers Handbook, and Objective-C 2.0 Phrasebook.