Re: Objective-C bugs and GCC releases

[Adrian Robert]

On Jan 25, 2005, at 9:29 AM, Mark Mitchell wrote:

> It may be that the Objective-C doesn't have the resources to maintain 
> the Objective-C front end.  In that case, you are probaby out of luck; 
> it's unlikely that people outside your community will maintain the 
> Objective-C front end gratis just to make the world a better place.  
> So, if you care about GNU Objective-C, you're going to want to 
> organize a community around that language that includes some GCC 
> developers.

The problem is not the nonexistence of Objective-C GCC developers, but 
their being outnumbered by the C/C++ ones (who thus determine both pace 
of development and release criteria).  Since GCC is an FSF project, I 
hope that such a path to "tyranny of the majority" can be averted.

Not because it is FSF's place to provide a warm niche for every small 
software community out there, but because a central part of the FSF's 
mission is to provide platform support for developing independence from 
proprietary software.  Objective-C and the GNUstep project based on it 
advance that goal.  Architectural and incremental performance 
improvements in gcc-4.0 (from tree-ssa, etc.), while nice to have, do 
not.  (What version of gcc does the linux kernel officially use?)

Again, I'm not suggesting a return to the days of gcc and egcs.  And 
there IS a good argument for prioritizing C/C++ support.  Just, please 
don't be so quick to preserve discontinuities in levels of support with 
these comments of "go find more developers" and "we're not going to 
wait for you".