Re: Interesting discussion on gcc about objc

[Nicola Pero]

>> They have entire testsuites that test the languages, and make no changes
>> that ever break it.  It's remarkable how hard they support it given that
>> none of them uses it. ;-)
>
> I'd like to see when that code was written

Ehm, actually I wrote the original GCC Objective-C testsuite myself. ;-)

Of course, over the years Apple added most of the "interesting" tests 
as they were working on weird cases and bugs.


>> What we need to realize, in my view, is that the "GNU Objective-C Compiler"
>> and the "GNU Objective-C Runtime" can only be maintained by the "GNU 
>> Objective-C
>> People".  And the "GNU Objective-C People" is mostly us (GNUstep), the people
>> on this mailing list! ;-)
>
> Exactly how long do you think it would take for us to have a working
> ObjC2.0 Implementation in GCC?   I'm willing to help, but, honestly,
> GNUstep has so many other issues that need to be dealt with using LLVM
> instead of GCC to me seems a viable option since it removes the burden
> of maintaining the compiler from us.

You can use LLVM.  Nobody prevents you from doing that. ;-)

If there is a need to have ObjC 2.0 right now, use LLVM.  Let's improve support
for it. :-)

But you can't remove support for GCC from GNUstep.  GCC is the default compiler 
on "enterprise" Linux distributions.  Many of the key users of GNUstep are 
companies 
running "enterprise" Linux servers and they would be extremely disappointed if
GNUstep stopped working out-of-the-box on standard "enterprise" Linux 
distributions.

I think LLVM is great in that there will be a new Objective-C compiler to pick 
from.
Until recently, GCC had been the only choice.  It's great to have a choice.

Thanks