On Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 3:18 AM Richard Stallman <
rms@gnu.org> wrote:
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> There have been instances where GCC was released without a working ObjC
> compiler effectively breaking GNUstep in the eyes of the rest of the
> world. Other compilers do not let this happen, but, for some reason, GCC
> did and still does not consider Objective-C regressions to be a blocker.
> Only C, and C++ issues. GCC needs to consider Objective-C to be important
> enough to its ecosystem to halt a release to fix a critical regression
> otherwise GNUstep is not being treated equally.
WHat you say is valid. And I think I could bring about that change in
policy, if some of you will support my push.
I will certainly support this change in policy in GCC.
However, missing ObjC features have also been mentioned. How crucial
are those to GNUstep?
The features GCC is currently missing are:
1) ARC - Automatic Reference Counting - This feature automates the memory management by having the compiler determine when to call retain and release on objects.
2) full support of properties (this is crucial to #1, since it uses information from the property declarations to control how ARC is done) currently they are partially supported in GCC.
3) Fast enumeration - This feature allows quick handling of array enumeration.
Can someone identify the missing features that GNUstep
absolutely needs?
Much care has been taken to make sure that there are no hard dependencies on these features in order to compile/build GNUstep. The issue is that most applications written by developers which target macOS/Cocoa are written based on the assumption that these features are available. So, while GNUstep can be built and works just fine without them, bringing applications over from the macOS platform becomes more complicated due to their absence.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)