Re: sync.m

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

Nicola Pero wrote:
> As GCC 2.95.3 was released in March 16, 2001, it may make sense to no 
> longer support it.
> Or maybe it does.  I vote for supporting it.
Me obviously too!
> Anyway the question really is - what is the oldest GCC that we support 
> if it's not 2.95.3 ?
>
> 3.0.4 (released February 20, 2002) ?
Actually I think I find it more useful to support gcc 2.95 than 3.0.4 if 
any oddity will arise. From a personal experience in porting to non-gnu 
and non-BSD platforms, gcc 2.95 is a big milestone. THe next one is gcc 
3.2, which was the last reasonable gcc compiler (with that I mean that 
if you can run 3.0, chances are high that 3.2 will be a no brainer). 
From that point on things get hairier with every release, depending 
more and more on gnu binary utilities, gnu assembler and with gcc 4 on 
other libraries. This makes it really a pain to bootstrap the compiler. 
I never got a reliable gcc > 3.2 on my AIX 4.x boxen at my old workplace 
and although IRIX was difficult, I do't think I got anything past gcc 
3.4 to work. OFten C does work, but C++ does not and usually people like 
to have one compiler for C, C++ and Obj-C!
Not that we support those platforms, I just used those as examples.
> Just mentioning c99 doesn't seem to help that much since IIRC no 
> version of GCC
> actually implements all of c99 anyway.  I actually am not really sure 
> what C99 features,
> added after 2.95, we really need.
This is correct, since from my knowledge we only support gcc and more 
recently clang. There aren't many other obj-c compilers around and AFAIk 
we don't support them.


> We can use -Wdeclaration-after-statement to get a post-2.95 GCC warn 
> you when you locally declare variables without starting a { } block.
> Really not a problem - it's easy enough to add it to gnustep-base and 
> gnustep-gui.
We can do that, but fixing those is relatively trivial and personally I 
like to have all declarations on top, it is much more readable.
Variadic Macros where an initial hurdle, but now I learned how to cope 
with them, Easy it is just ugly to #ifdef the code.

These are the two recurrent things which I usually fix.

Then there is instead a nasty compiler bug, which is that forward 
declarations of protocols is broken, but core avoids that cleanly up to now.

Riccardo