On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 5:02 PM, Gregory Casamento <greg.casame...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Granted, however, at the very least GCC should consciously ramp up it’s > support for Objective-C. Currently the Objective-C implementation in GCC is > woefully out of date as it doesn’t include basic support for ARC.
I would like to see that happen, but we must be realistic. GCC development is driven in part by volunteers and in part by company contributions. There is only one large company that is interested in Objective C: Apple. Apple has chosen to use clang/LLVM and reject GCC, ostensibly for licensing reasons (although personally speaking I have to say that those arguments have not made sense to me for some time). It follows that all work on Objective C support in GCC will be done by volunteers. Most people who use Objective C naturally use clang/LLVM; after all, it is free, and it works well. So the volunteer pool for Objective C in GCC is relatively small. It is basically those people who want or need to use Objective C and prefer to use GCC, or GPL software in general. There aren't very many of those people. They've actually done a good job in maintaining GCC's Objective C frontend. But while I would like to see significant additions to the frontend like ARC support, I would hesitate on planning to see it occur. To the extent that clang/LLVM and GCC are fighting, which is not really the case, then I think it makes sense for GCC to focus on its strengths, not its weaknesses. Objective C is not a strength. I'm not sure it makes sense for the GCC project to encourage its limited volunteer resources to work on it. Sorry for being blunt, but that is how I see it. Ian
