Re: Status of gnustep for gcc-4.6

[David Chisnall]

On 16 Mar 2011, at 01:01, John W Kennedy wrote:

> And it is the standard compiler for the just-out Xcode 4, though GCC 4.6 and 
> GCC/LLVM are also available. Because of its many hooks, it vastly improves 
> edit-time error detection.


Minor correction.  GCC4.2 and LLVM-GCC 4.2 (GCC 4.2 front end, LLVM back end) 
are also available.  

GCC 4.2.1 was the last version to be released under GPLv2.  Apple, like several 
other companies, will not ship any GPLv3 code due to the patent clause, so no 
future versions of GCC are ever likely to be shipped by Apple.  The LLVM 
project has discontinued support for LLVM-GCC, in favour of DragonEgg (GCC 4.5+ 
plugin that translates GIMPLE into LLVM IR), but this is unlikely to be shipped 
by Apple, so it's unclear whether llvm-gcc will be an option in future XCode 
releases.

Currently, I think, GCC is the default for compiling [Objective-]C++, but clang 
is now used for [Objective-]C.  Clang's C++ support is now pretty solid, so I 
doubt that Apple will continue supporting GCC for much longer.

David

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