FSF GCC ObjC(++) Support

[David Ayers]

Am Mittwoch, den 01.04.2009, 00:48 +0100 schrieb David Chisnall:
> > Well I'm not too fond of yet another compiler/runtime to support...  
> > but
> > if it is what apple will be using and it will also replace the current
> > apple runtime, I'm glad someone is working on it.  But I think will  
> > need
> > insure that our current main compiler / runtime stays in (or is  
> > restored
> > to) a decent condition.
> 
> Neither am I, but no one on the GCC side seems to be working on  
> Objective-C.  I tried to persuade the FreeBSD port maintainer to  
> enable ObjC++ recently in the default build, and his reaction was that  
> ObjC was basically unmaintained in GCC and ObjC++ was in an even worse  
> state.
> 
> Someone at Apple created some patches over a year ago for adding  
> support for properties to GCC on the GNU runtime.  Are they merged  
> yet?  No.  Is anyone planning on merging them, or rewriting their  
> functionality?  Not as far as I can see.  Do any of the GCC folks  
> outside of Apple give a dam about Objective-C?  Not that I can tell;  
> we had a /stable/ release ship generating errors with any Objective-C  
> program containing constant strings a while ago, and the GCC response  
> was 'Objective-C is not a priority'.
> 
> If we continue to treat GCC as our main compiler then run the risk  
> that we are depending on a project which has no interest in  
> maintaining the features we need.  [snip]

I currently have no insight into whether clang is a viable alternative
to the FSF GCC ObjC(++) support.  I'm glad that someone so close the
GNUstep project is actively working on support GNUstep.  I also have no
insight on how portable clang is compared to FSF GCC ObjC++ (ie. we'd be
back to defining and testing the platforms GNUstep should care about wrt
to clang as I suggest for libffi).

For production systems, I certainly will prefer the FSF GCC at least
until clang has been packaged by major distributions.  I understand the
the price I need to pay is to either pay someone to maintain FSF ObjC
support, or do it myself.  Currently I'm trying to take the latter route
and try to finance that work via my actual business [which is ERP
implementations and not compiler/runtime/GNUstep development... but then
again I doubt that's hardly anybodies business on this list] (well, I
haven't talked to Andrew P. about his rate yet ;-) ).

Yet I simply cannot offer meaningful help for ObjC++ since I'm simply
not C++ literate.  So I'm hoping that someone will step up help maintain
that at least until other solutions become widely available.

Cheers,
David