Re: Clang/LLVM migration roadmap

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

> On 6 Feb 2022, at 19:09, Fred Kiefer <fredkiefer@gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> Am 06.02.2022 um 01:14 schrieb Gregory Casamento <greg.casamento@gmail.com>:
>> 
>> 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
> 
> Again I beg to differ. Of course the first two point are true and need to be 
> addressed. But I am not aware of any critical bug in gcc that is currently 
> hindering us. There are many missing features and this is really bad for 
> GNUstep and ObjC as a whole. As for the position of the gcc team on ObjC, 
> none of knows and we only may guess here. The one time where a gcc release 
> knowingly broke ObjC was ages ago. Maybe it could happen again, we just don’t 
> know. Stating something as a fact that is just a possibility is a rather 
> annoying habit of our times. Please don’t do so on the GNUstep mailing list.

Yes, I remember thinking (and should have said) that I know of no bugs in the 
GCC implementation (though of course there may be some), and that a bad release 
many years ago is not indicative of current or recent support.

However, I think it is fair enough to assume that, unless someone like us 
volunteers to add a major thing like ARC (or even something as simple as new 
syntactic sugar), it probably won't happen.