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Re: Clang/LLVM migration roadmap


From: Max Chan
Subject: Re: Clang/LLVM migration roadmap
Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2022 19:47:06 -0500

Just a thought, Apple has released Swift for Linux amd64 and Windows. Can we piggyback on that? That means on Windows even if libobjc2 turns out to be almost impossible to implement people can still use Swift libraries to achieve the same.

Sent from my iPad

On Feb 5, 2022, at 7:17 PM, Gregory Casamento <greg.casamento@gmail.com> wrote:


All,

As promised in my reply to Wolfgang, I am starting the thread regarding this migration.

There are a number of factors that are driving this:
--
1) GCC lacks support for many memory management features that are commonly used today
2) GCC's objective-c support is lagging behind and doesn't include support for @[], @{}, @autorelease, etc etc etc
3) Lack of bug fixes in GCC's implementation of ObjC
4) GCC team does not consider ObjC release critical and will and HAS released with broken support for building ObjC targets.  
All of these things are UNACCEPTABLE

There are a number of reasons why we still use GCC:
--
1) Currently, libobjc2 does not support some architectures and also does not build easily on Windows under MSYS2.  While some older architectures are, perhaps, not as important, building on Windows under MSYS2 is critical.
2) GNUstep is an FSF project, so there is a political component if we don't support GCC anymore.   This is not a show-stopper but is something to consider.

Advantages of LLVM/Clang
--
1) ARC
2) support for modern features in objc that are commonly used
3) more developers will be able to port their applications to GNUstep

Disadvantages
--
1) libobjc2 is currently, as stated above, unstable or unsupported on some architectures / operating systems.

Approach
--
1) make sure that libobjc2 is supported on as wide a range of platforms as possible.  
2) Fix issues with building on Windows/msys2

We should make the transition as easy as possible for people who are currently using GCC to switch over to Clang/LLVM.

Please feel free to discuss...

Yours, GC
--
Gregory Casamento
GNUstep Lead Developer / OLC, Principal Consultant
http://www.gnustep.org - http://heronsperch.blogspot.com
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