>> And I believe supporting swift would then would make things even worse as >> its even further away. We have to modernize GNUStep to keep up with the >> current tools. That doesn't mean we need to implement everything Apple has >> added in the last 20 years, but at least a fundamental subset so 95% of Apps >> could be ported without any major issues. And in my eyes ARC must absolutely >> be supported in the default installations. Expecting a newcomer to first >> recompile GNUStep (which has quite a few pitfalls if you do it for the first >> time) can easily discurage new developers. > > ARC is already supported in GNUstep when using clang. I am confused
It is supported when using clang AND libobjc2 This means when gnustep-base is compiled with the old runtime, you can not write code which uses ARC as the runtime doesnt support it. Hence take the newest debian release (or next release) do an apt-get install gnustep-gui etc and you have a working gnustep system but you can not write any modern code on it. You can only look at prebuilt binaries but not do anything yourself (if you require ARC). Thats the giant showstopper in my eyes to get new developers on board. > >> It doesn't mean GNUStep code itself must use ARC but the default runtime >> must become libobjc2 so ARC is supported for all the projects who need it >> (which is 95% of todays modern projects I believe). If not, GNUStep will end >> up in the Legacy corner forever. Thats in my eyes also a key issue to keep >> GNUStep attractive for old and new developers. And because gcc's lack of >> support for the Objc language, this means moving everthing to clang as a >> consequence. >> >> Documentation: >> >> Personally, I'm willing to do some efforts to (re-)write documentation once >> its clear where this is heading. >> The Apple automatic documentation production using DocC >> (https://www.swift.org/documentation/docc/) sounded very neat for that in my >> eyes but I have no clue if this could be easily be applied into GNUStep. But >> that approach would bind the code to the documentation and would >> tremendously help to keep the documentation up to date. > > We would need to get DocC, which is written in Swift, working on Linux and > GNUstep in the first place. Oh didn't know DocC is written in Swift. But in any case, producing the documentation for the webpage with DocC could initially be done on a mac until thats ready. Or some other similar tool could be used.
