Re: macOS/GCC support policy

[Alan Third]

On Sat, Aug 03, 2019 at 02:10:45PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Sat, 3 Aug 2019 12:02:56 +0100
> > From: Alan Third <address@hidden>
> > Cc: Philipp Stephani <address@hidden>, address@hidden,
> >     address@hidden
> > 
> > On Fri, Aug 02, 2019 at 06:05:20PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > > 
> > > Why does Emacs need AppKit/AppKit.h?  If this is for some important
> > > functionality, and if we cannot find a compatible replacement, I guess
> > > the conclusion is that we cannot build Emacs on macOS with GCC due to
> > > the Apple system headers.
> > 
> > Appkit is, basically, the NextStep GUI toolkit, so we need it.
> 
> So basically, this means GCC cannot be currently used to compile any
> non-trivial NS GUI application, is that right?

Yes. As Philippe demonstrated GCC errors when it sees the header
files.

> Is there any ETA on GCC support for the current NS GUI?  Is anyone
> working on that, to the best of your knowledge?

As far as I’m aware nobody is working on it. Features like blocks have
been part of Apple’s Objective C spec for at least a decade now and I
don’t believe there has been any attempt to update GCC.

GNUstep doesn’t use these updated features, but it does mean they
can’t match the current Apple APIs. Although I don’t know if they want
to, I know very little about the project.
-- 
Alan Third