It does the project a huge reality check to tell developers they 'have to use an ancient version of the language *IF THEY WANT TO CONTRIBUTE TO GNUSTEP*'.
Why do you think that’s the case? I’ve contributed many changes over the last years and haven’t once built GNUstep with GCC. I just open a pull request with my changes on GitHub, and rely on the CI to automatically build and test the changes for me with both compilers and across different platforms. If something should fail I get an email and can force push any fixes needed before they would get merged, although that’s rarely the case because for most kinds of changes it won’t matter which compiler is used.
I’d never write any new *app* code without ARC, and would definitely recommend converting any existing apps if you can control the environment where they are built, but IMO it’s fine that the GNUstep libraries don’t use it – it definitely doesn’t keep me from contributing. Most of the code works and is well tested over the years/decades, and so I’m not sure what exactly would be gained by a conversion in comparison to the downside of loosing GCC users.
Frederik