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Re: Objective-C bugs and GCC releases
On Jan 25, 2005, at 9:29 AM, Mark Mitchell wrote:
It may be that the Objective-C doesn't have the resources to maintain
the Objective-C front end. In that case, you are probaby out of luck;
it's unlikely that people outside your community will maintain the
Objective-C front end gratis just to make the world a better place.
So, if you care about GNU Objective-C, you're going to want to
organize a community around that language that includes some GCC
developers.
The problem is not the nonexistence of Objective-C GCC developers, but
their being outnumbered by the C/C++ ones (who thus determine both pace
of development and release criteria). Since GCC is an FSF project, I
hope that such a path to "tyranny of the majority" can be averted.
Not because it is FSF's place to provide a warm niche for every small
software community out there, but because a central part of the FSF's
mission is to provide platform support for developing independence from
proprietary software. Objective-C and the GNUstep project based on it
advance that goal. Architectural and incremental performance
improvements in gcc-4.0 (from tree-ssa, etc.), while nice to have, do
not. (What version of gcc does the linux kernel officially use?)
Again, I'm not suggesting a return to the days of gcc and egcs. And
there IS a good argument for prioritizing C/C++ support. Just, please
don't be so quick to preserve discontinuities in levels of support with
these comments of "go find more developers" and "we're not going to
wait for you".