All,
As promised in my reply to Wolfgang, I am starting the thread regarding
this migration.
There are a number of factors that are driving this:
--
1) GCC lacks support for many memory management features that are commonly
used today
2) GCC's objective-c support is lagging behind and doesn't include support
for @[], @{}, @autorelease, etc etc etc
3) Lack of bug fixes in GCC's implementation of ObjC
4) GCC team does not consider ObjC release critical and will and HAS
released with broken support for building ObjC targets.
All of these things are UNACCEPTABLE
There are a number of reasons why we still use GCC:
--
1) Currently, libobjc2 does not support some architectures and also does
not build easily on Windows under MSYS2. While some older architectures
are, perhaps, not as important, building on Windows under MSYS2 is critical.
2) GNUstep is an FSF project, so there is a political component if we don't
support GCC anymore. This is not a show-stopper but is something to
consider.
Advantages of LLVM/Clang
--
1) ARC
2) support for modern features in objc that are commonly used
3) more developers will be able to port their applications to GNUstep
Disadvantages
--
1) libobjc2 is currently, as stated above, unstable or unsupported on some
architectures / operating systems.
Approach
--
1) make sure that libobjc2 is supported on as wide a range of platforms as
possible.
2) Fix issues with building on Windows/msys2
We should make the transition as easy as possible for people who are
currently using GCC to switch over to Clang/LLVM.
Please feel free to discuss...
Yours, GC
--
Gregory Casamento
GNUstep Lead Developer / OLC, Principal Consultant
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