Re: Gcc 3.0 Open Issues

[Helge Hess <helge dot hess at mdlink dot de>]

"Bryan W. Headley" wrote:
> 4. What's the ObjC demand look like with Mac OS/X and GNUStep
> clientele? I'm wondering what ObjC++ is, and whether insertion of it's
> features would take care of the kruft problems that ObjC has.

As far as I have seen ObjC is still considered part of gcc, which is
good. The basic features are stable and probably don't need a lot of
further work. There are some smaller things which would be nice in the
compiler, but there are no people doing such work, so we are basically
stuck.
We'll see how much input comes from Apple here.

Regarding ObjC++, I guess this probably won't go into gcc 3.0 since it's
addition is a significant amount of work and doesn't have a lot of
support. Apple's ObjC++ is AFAIK based on gcc 2.7.x which makes adding
the stuff to gcc 3.0 quite difficult. Besides that it doesn't fix any of
the ObjC problems we have (which are mostly related to dynamic function
interception and dispatch). ObjC++ allows integration of ObjC and C++
which is nice but not incredible important (we survived without it quiet
some time ;-)

A thing which might be useful would be the sharing of the Boehm GC
between the ObjC and the Java runtime. The same is true for libffi if
that is going to be part of gcc.

Greetings
  Helge