В Tue, 29 Oct 2019 12:50:23 +0000, David Chisnall написа: > On 27/10/2019 16:05, Gregory Casamento wrote: >> We are a GNU / FSF project. Dropping support for GCC would be bad >> political mojo. There is little we can do to bridge the gap other >> than doing these macros. > > I don't really understand how this works. GCC does not support a > post-2005 dialect of Objective-C. GNUstep is a framework that aims to > provide an implementation of the 2019 Objective-C standard library. Why > is it politically problematic for GNUstep to drop support for GCC, but > not problematic for GCC to drop support for GNUstep?
But GCC didn't drop support for GNUstep. It just cannot cope with the changes of the language/runtime that are completely under the control of a single corporation. It is not surprising that the last major changes in GCC related to Objective-C were implemented by GNUstep developers (Nicola and Richard, IIRC). > For what it's worth, I've spoken to a couple of GCC devs over the > last few years about supporting modern Objective-C (because I would > like us to have a choice of compilers), but the effort involved for > them is huge (even a naive ARC implementation is a big piece of > effort) and the return is small (why would anyone use it? You are right that it's a monumental effort and that they probably don't have the motivation. The pool of free software written in Objective-C is rather small and it doesn't tend to increase. > Basically, the only target market is GNUstep developers on platforms > that Clang doesn't support, which I think is a set containing only > Riccardo). This is an exaggeration. I fixed a bug in SOPE on SuperH just a few months ago. Over the years, I recall fixes in GNUstep core libraries on HP-PA, GNU/Hurd and GNU/kFreeBSD, to name a few. And non-core packages on sparc, ppc, ppc64, powerpcspe and m68k. GNUstep aims for portability and this is closely related with code quality. Once you start dropping targets for no good reason you can expect regressions in quality here and there, and more effort when the need to support a new architecture arises. As it stands, none of the GNUstep reverse dependencies currently in Debian will benefit if we suddenly switch to LLVM/Clang. We'll just have to stop building the GNUstep stack on about half of the architectures and at the end it will reflect back on GNUstep. В Wed, 30 Oct 2019 01:27:56 +0200, Sergii Stoian написа: > IMHO political motifs shouldn’t constrain technical decisions Well, the goal of the GNU Project is technical but that goal is set because of an ideal and GNU maintainers are supposed to exercise proper judgment when making decisions on technical matters, too. > Moreover using these nice Objective-C 2.0 features make GNUstep code > look much more familiar to potential macOS/iOS developers. It is extremely naive to expect that macOS/iOS developers will start coming in numbers, anxious to implement classes and missing functionality, just because of that. GNUstep predates the thing called "Objective-C 2.0" and I don't remember an avalanche of patches flowing in before 2005. (Likewise, it was foolish to presume that the move to GitHub will install an entire new generation of energetic programmers. The reality is that pretty much the same small set of heroic people are doing the work.)
