Re: GCC and Clang

[Umberto Cerrato]

wow!
could that mean it would be easier to install "gnustep"? (and program objc 
programs?)
because I was actually asking: is there a more lightweight compiler than those 
available?

by the way I am trying to figure out how to install gnustep...

u

> Il giorno 11 feb 2022, alle ore 16:29, H. Nikolaus Schaller 
> <hns@goldelico.com> ha scritto:
> 
> 
> 
>>> Am 08.02.2022 um 17:38 schrieb Gregory Casamento <greg.casamento@gmail.com>:
>>> 
>>> The way I see it, we have two ways we can go.
>> 
>> Usually there is a third...
>> 
>>> In each, I have outlined what I believe needs to be done.  It may or may 
>>> not be complete:
>> 
>> GCC
>> 1) Implement syntactic sugar 
>>   a) This includes @[], @{}, and @autorelease as well as
>>   b) Various @property directives
>>   c) Improvements to the GCC libobjc to support the new syntax
>>      i) Implementation of ARC in the runtime
> 
> What about a preprocessor for gcc to add the missing syntactic sugar?
> 
> It may be much easier to maintain than digging into gcc source code.
> 
> BTW: this is the same method as ObjC did come to our world.
> Brad Cox wrote a preprocessor for C...
> 
> It was NeXT who integrated ObjC syntax into gcc, according to
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11639658
> 
> IMHO we should start to think more in modular vs. monolithic approaches,
> especially as computing power has increased and developer's time
> is limited. Splitting into preprocessor and compiler would be such
> a modularization. Costs some processor time but saves developer's time.
> 
> Of course there are limitations to what a simple preprocessor
> can do (e.g. it needs quite a lot of logic in the AST to track data
> types of symbols), but as far as I see especially @[], @{}, and @autorelease
> should not be extremely difficult. They are more or less macros that
> can be expanded.
> 
> ARC is a different topic. But I think it can also be done by a
> preprocessor. If a full compiler can determine when to add retain/release
> from static syntax analysis, a preprocessor can as well. Again provided
> that it has a grammer and builds an abstract syntax tree. Well, such
> a preprocessor is sort of a fragment of a fully fledged compiler. It is
> lacking code optimization rules, memory and register allocation, ABI
> compatible assembler output, helper libraries etc.
> 
> In other words: it lacks all problems which we have with LLVM/Clang and
> gcc.
> 
> Generally this would give objc programmers a solution and gcc developers
> time to fully integrate such features (and then the preprocessor
> becomes a simple "cat <input | gcc" command...).
> 
> What I don't know is how attractive this is. Well, I have code for an
> ObjC processor [1] which is a good basis but it appears as if nobody
> wants to jump on this idea and help to develop it.
> 
> just my 2cts, Nikolaus
> 
> [1]: https://github.com/goldelico/mySTEP/tree/master/ObjC