On Wed, Nov 20, 2019 at 10:52:36AM +0000, David Chisnall wrote: > Oh, and with ARC, all of the C++ implementations have correct memory > management for Objective-C, for free.
While dropping support for GCC does not strike me as a problem, switching the core implementation to depend upon C++ may well do. How many developers are comfortable with C++? I gave up on it a number of years ago, simply because IMO it was too complex and fragile; basically I viewed it as an engineering nightmare. Every project I've seen using it (either public, or commercial) seem to use a different subset, and it can be difficult to spot when a mechanism outwith that subset accidentally creeps in. > Even today, I believe the Cairo back end is still using the 'toy' font > APIs and not the ones that integrate with Harfbuzz, so we get quite poor > kerning with Cairo and miss some important features. I noticed that a few years ago. I'd have thought changing the Cairo backend to use the real API should be independent of any support for other backends (xlib, art). DF
