I think the decision needs to tie back to the core mission of the project. I’m
not 100% sure what that is. Is it “Grow the GNUStep user base?” Or is it
“Maintain a fully copy-left tool chain?” Or some combination?
Honesty, either way, I think llvm/clang is the right choice right now. The
project has neither the resources nor the capacity to influence gcc’s ObjC
support. In my view, if you want to influence gcc, the best way would be to
have 10 times more GNUStep users asking them for better ObjC support. In other
words, leverage llvm/clang to grow the user base and then use that to get more
clout with the gcc project.
If you’re looking to recruit more GNUStep users, I just don’t think you can do
that without ARC, @[], @{}, etc. There are plenty of ObjC developers out there
right now who are potential future GNUSteppers. And as you recruit people, I
think “you have to use ObjC instead of Swift” is a much easier pitch than “you
have to do manual memory management and type out objectAtIndex: every time you
want to get an object from an array”
Just my two cents.
Sent from my iPhone
> On Feb 6, 2022, at 2:02 PM, Gregory Casamento <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>
> Fred,
>
> On Sun, Feb 6, 2022 at 2:09 PM Fred Kiefer <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>
>> > Am 06.02.2022 um 01:14 schrieb Gregory Casamento
>> > <[email protected]>:
>> >
>> > 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
>>
>> Again I beg to differ. Of course the first two point are true and need to be
>> addressed. But I am not aware of any critical bug in gcc that is currently
>> hindering us. There are many missing features and this is really bad for
>> GNUstep and ObjC as a whole. As for the position of the gcc team on ObjC,
>> none of knows and we only may guess here. The one time where a gcc release
>> knowingly broke ObjC was ages ago. Maybe it could happen again, we just
>> don’t know. Stating something as a fact that is just a possibility is a
>> rather annoying habit of our times. Please don’t do so on the GNUstep
>> mailing list.
>
> I am not sure the last time I saw a significant bug fix in the objc code in
> GCC.
>
>> As is typing words in all capital letters. It really doesn’t help in polite
>> conversations.
>
>> Fred
>
> GC
> --
> Gregory Casamento
> GNUstep Lead Developer / OLC, Principal Consultant
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