Re: Is there any way to use ARC in 32-bit?

[David Chisnall]

On 28 Jan 2015, at 17:49, Richard Frith-Macdonald 
<richardfrithmacdonald@gmail.com> wrote:

> When tryiung to move people over to using clang and libobjc2, everyone seems 
> to have problems with building libobjc2 because of its cmake dependency :-(

People who can't manage:

$ mkdir Build ; cd Build
$ cmake ..
$ ccmake . # Optional, only do if you want to enter the curses UI to tweak 
configure options
$ make && make install

Probably are going to struggle with a lot of other things too...

> I can certainly help with discussions and patch integration for gnustep-make 
> to better use clang, but almost as useful would be building libobjc2 without 
> requiring cmake.

You are *far* more likely to find developers familiar with CMake than GNUstep 
Make (or, in fact, pretty much any other build system).  To put some real 
numbers on this, in the FreeBSD ports tree there are 1018 ports that use CMake, 
90 that use GNUstep Make.  For comparison, there are 399 that use autotools.

LLVM and clang are among the ones that use CMake, so if you can build LLVM then 
you can build libobjc2.  If you aren't building clang, but are instead getting 
it from your distribution's packaging system, then you should get libobjc2 from 
there as well.  *Every* distro that has a package manager has generic 
infrastructure in their packaging system for dealing with things that use CMake 
to build.  Very few have generic infrastructure for dealing with things that 
use GNUstep Make to build (we do in FreeBSD, but it's crufty and horrible, not 
very reliable, and badly in need of rewriting).

Adding the libobjc2 port to FreeBSD was trivial (somewhat complicated by the 
fact that we use different compilers and different configure options on FreeBSD 
10 and later than on older ones, but that's FreeBSD-specific).  Keeping the 
other GNUstep ports up to date is significantly more work.  I'm still trying to 
track down a bug in the GNUstep Make port that results in the installed package 
not being able to build anything on 10.x unless you have the clang34 port 
installed...

David

-- Sent from my PDP-11