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Re: Interesting discussion on gcc about objc


From: Gregory Casamento
Subject: Re: Interesting discussion on gcc about objc
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2010 14:33:01 -0400

Andrew,

Well, it seems like Nicola has stepped up to the plate and others are
willing to help him, myself included.

The reality of the situation here is that Apple drives Objective-C's
development.   Apple has the benefit of having many employees who are
being paid to build their implementation of the compiler and can spend
the time doing optimizations to their ObjC front end.   If Apple isn't
actively involved in GCC's implementation of ObjC it's very likely
that it will fall behind unless there is a significant community
effort to bring it up to date which, until Nicola started making
contributions, there hasn't been any.

Not to spark a flame war here, but I've had some serious questions in
my mind as to the GCC project's ability or willingness to help since
the project seems entirely focused on endlessly improving the C, C++
and Fortran front-ends and doesn't work on ObjC at all.

I realize I'm going to take some heat for saying this, but I would
hate to see a day when GNUstep would need to drop support for GCC
because the implementation is just too old.   We haven't reached that
day yet, but the way things have been going up until now it's not far
off.   This project has enough challenges with getting developers in
the first place.... it's fundamentally unsupportable for us to
maintain both the enormous codebase which is GNUstep as well as the
ObjC front-end in GCC when the GCC project has proven a number of
times in the past that they don't consider Objective-C a priority.

Sincerely, GC

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 1:40 PM, Andrew Pinski <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Pete French <address@hidden> wrote:
>> In practical terms that stance doesn't exactly lead to us ending up with
>> a good complier though does it? Clang is a v.good compiler, and is being
>> maintained. Not supporting it is rather biting off our nose to spite
>> our face, especially if GCC isn't interested in supporting ObjC anymore.
>
> Well GCC is interested in Objective-C except we don't have anyone
> really working on it.  That is the biggest issue right now.  We want
> to support it; trust me.  If someone would step up to the plate and do
> the supporting work, we will keep it.  The biggest issue is that Apple
> had stepped up to the plate and then disappeared to go do clang
> because of politics due to GPLv3.  Since GNUStep is a GNU project I
> think we should support GPLv3 friendly companies/projects before we
> give in to ones that don't want to even want to look at GPLv3 code.
>
> Thanks,
> Andrew Pinski
>
> _______________________________________________
> Gnustep-dev mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnustep-dev
>



-- 
Gregory Casamento - GNUstep Lead/Principal Consultant, OLC, Inc.
yahoo/skype: greg_casamento, aol: gjcasa
(240)274-9630 (Cell)



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