ARC Cleanups

[David Chisnall]

Hi Everyone,

I'd like to make some changes to GNUstep so that we can make ARC nice and fast 
(closer to Lion speeds, not Snow Leopard speeds) by eliminating all of the 
message sends if we're not linking to any frameworks that do evil things with 
retain / release / autorelease methods.  These are:

1) Swap the order of the zone and the refcount in obj_layout so that the 
runtime can manipulate refcounts without having to be aware of the zone pointer 
(not sure how widely used zones are, and we may want to get rid of this pointer 
if it's not used in the future).

2) Remove the custom retain / release methods on placeholder instances - these 
can potentially hide double-release bugs that depend on specifics of the 
implementation, so I'm not totally sure that they're a good idea anyway.

Does anyone have any objections to these changes?  Will they break anyone's 
code?

David

-- Sent from my IBM 1620