GCC suport for Objective-C [Was: NSSound Reimplementation]

[Fred Kiefer]

David Chisnall schrieb:
> On 16 Jul 2009, at 18:34, Riccardo Mottola wrote:
>>> Sorry, I just haven't had a chance to look at installing a
>>> new/different compiler and working with that yet, though it really IS
>>> something I'd like to be playing with.
>>>
>>> However, it doesn't really have any bearing on this issue because we
>>> have to develop code for the existing compiler and will need to do so
>>> as long as we continue to support it (gcc).
>>>
>> Yes, I remember a caveat: that was it, no gcc support. As a GNU
>> project I'd be quite waey to drop gcc support.
> 
> As a GNU project, I'd hope that the GNU compiler collection would put
> some effort into supporting us!  Someone at Apple sent them patches for
> supporting declared properties over a year ago, and yet GCC still does
> not support any of the extensions added in OS X 10.5, which was released
> two years ago.
> 
> Snow Leopard is going to make heavy use of blocks and declared
> properties in the API, and if we want to remain compatible, we are going
> to need a compiler that supports these.  It would be really great if GCC
> would, but I have yet to see any evidence that anyone is still actively
> working on Objective-C support in GCC.  In the last two years, Clang has
> gone from having no Objective-C support to supporting most of
> Objective-C 2 on the GNU runtime, while GCC has not gained a single new
> Objective-C feature.

David,

your mail got me thinking, I wont switch to Clang and I don't hope
GNUstep as a project will. So the only option forward is to start
working on better Objective-C support in gcc. I surely wont have time
for this beside my maintainer task on GNUstep, but this seems currently
the more important task. I will have a look at the code in gcc that
supports Objective-C and if I am able to make any sense of it, I might
switch over to work on that.

Cheers
Fred