Hi,
I initially avoided jumping into this thread...because it considerably
diverts from the comments about a release of the virtual machine image
to the status of GNUstep, a point where we often argue about.
However since I had already personal chats again about this matter, I
will express my view in public. They are my opinions, as a long time
developer, user and enthusiast of GNUstep and as a (former) Mac
enthusiast. No more, no less.
Anyone coming from OS X or iPhone development is going to expect either clang,
or a compiler with equivalent functionality to clang. Giving them an
Objective-C environment that is just about at feature party with OS X 10.4 does
not give the best impression of GNUstep.
And? They may expect, let them expect! DO I have a binding contract with
them? Is GNUstep some kind of porting tool at the convenience of any Mac
developer?
That's not my view of the project. I want a powerful framework which can
support and produce useful Applications in the free software world, thus
Linux, BSD and which is capable of running on other hosts as well like
Hurd, Solaris, Windows and others
Of course, when implementing stuff, it is a good thing to be compatible
with Apple, to ease code reuse. But Since I dislike more and more the
direction of Apple's software, why should GNUstep follow them? ON the
other side Apple has a lot of cool stuff I want too!
So APple may be an inspiration.
As Nicola writes... if I want an Apple I buy an Apple, not a Pear or a
Lemon. Are KDE and GNOME clones of Windows or CDE? Much less than we are
of Mac! They are often heavily inspired.
We can do better of course, we have more interesting premises, but
that's it.
Some people may wish to have GCC support as well. I've recently
stopped testing everything with GCC, as the lack of features means
that I can no longer build significant portions of my code with it
(anything that requires the non-fragile ABI or blocks, and anything
that needs to interoperate with code using GC), although I still try
to test code that only uses ObjC 1 features with GCC 4.2.1 (the last
GPLv2 version - the license change means that I will probably never
see more recent GCC in the FreeBSD base system - FreeBSD 9 is expected
to ship with Clang and GCC, FreeBSD 10 with just Clang).
I want my code to work from gcc 2.95 upwards! Including clang.
Riccardo
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