Re: Interesting discussion on gcc about objc

[David Chisnall]

On 13 Sep 2010, at 13:53, Vincent Richomme wrote:

>>> GNU ObjC has so few users that it seems hardly worth the effort
> 
> In the same time do you have an idea of how many people are interested
> in gnustep ?
> I would be very curious to know it.
> DO you some some fugures ?

I've absolutely no idea.  I suspect that OS X and the iPhone have increased 
interest a bit, and will a bit more once we have a UIKit implementation, but I 
don't have any real figures.  The only data point I have is that all of the 
talks I gave at FOSDEM this year had people standing up in the audience because 
there weren't enough chairs in our devroom for everyone.

I'm not condemning GCC for its stance.  C and C++ are definitely much more 
popular languages than Objective-C, and I wouldn't blame them if they decided 
to completely drop Objective-C support.  No one's really worked on it for 
around 7 years and the code that they inherited from NeXT is basically 
unmaintainable.  I just get fed up with people saying 'we have to make an 
effort to support GCC because we are also a GNU project' when people on the GCC 
side say that supporting us is too much effort. 

David

-- Send from my Jacquard Loom