Re: Clang/LLVM migration roadmap

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

On 2022-02-06 19:55:10 +0000 Richard Frith-Macdonald 
<richard@frithmacdonald.me.uk> wrote:


> 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.

Exactly, current support is quite nice.

And to this, think of Clang and Apple. APple switched to swift. Its 
support for ObjC-2 is currently good, but who knows for the future?
It perhaps remains  frozen language, with a few additions to keep on 
par with SWIFT compatibility in frameworks (e.g. ObjC 2.1) but  we 
will probably not see Obj-C 3.0
SO this makes on one side Obj-C 2.0 a relatively stable target to 
match, but also wonder about long-term support (your cited 5 years). 
Apple makes it always very easy to switch: they ship two compilers, 
the old and the new with the old and new SDK. We have more complex 
setups.


> 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.

Also true. However it could still prove interesting to enhance GCC a 
little bit and fix/enhnace the existing runtime. Someone could be 
motivated to add it, or we could just try ourselves.
But still, a hypotetical GCC 13 with better Obj-C support would need 
time to propagate in various distributions, especially ESR ones.

Riccardo
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