On 29 Feb 2008, at 16:56, David Chisnall wrote:
On 29 Feb 2008, at 16:39, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
IMHO, changing GNUstep in any way to require LLVM is generally not a
good move. It makes life even more difficult to have GNUstep included
in any Linux distribution because we can't influcence them to provide
a LLVM ObjC compiler. Or we have to maintain our own compilers.
To clarify:
I am categorically not advocating changing GNUstep to require LLVM.
I am advocating (and implementing) changing LLVM to be able to
compile GNUstep. I am also advocating (and plan on implementing)
support in LLVM for compiling Objective-C (and later Io and
Smalltalk) running atop my runtime. At which point, I will also
contribute changes to GNUstep to allow it to run atop my runtime (as
it already does on the GNU runtime and sometimes does on the NeXT/
Apple runtime).
I'd love to see support for your runtime in GNUstep (happy to add
patches to gnustep-base to allow that).
However, it's not clear to me how that can be achieved using gcc ...
since I was under the impression that your runtime was sufficiently
different in behavior that it would need quite a bit of compiler
support changes.
I completely understand your reluctance to work on gcc ... I've tried
to hack gcc code in the past and found it pretty incomprehensible
myself ... but would still advocate making the effort if possible
(certainly, if you had gcc fixes to use your runtime to support
objc-2.0 features I'd be keen to help lobby to get those changes into
gcc). I would have hoped that Apples objc-2.0 contributions to the
compiler would make it relatively easy to add support for objc-2.0
using your runtime ... you wouldn't have to start hacking gcc from
scratch.
I feel we need to try to get objc-2.0 for gnustep, but if we do that
by using a less widely available compiler we'll have to somehow try to
keep support for people who need to use gcc with the current gnu
runtime and that would probably be difficult. That wouldn't stop me
going ahead and incorporating objc-2.0 features using LLVM though.
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