Re: GCC 3.1 Released

[Nicola Pero <nicola at brainstorm dot co dot uk>]

> GCC 3.1 is now available.
> 
> In this release, we focused more on quality than new features; many
> bugs were fixed.  We worked very hard to fix bugs that were introduced
> in GCC 3.0, but that were not present in previous releases of the
> compiler.  We also worked hard to eliminate new bugs.
> 
> We have continued to improve the standards conformance in the C, C++
> and Java compilers, added support for profile-directed optimizations,
> improved support for many chips used in embedded systems, added an
> Ada compiler, and added support for the x86-64 architecture.
> 
> For a list of many -- but by no means all -- of the changes available
> in this release, see:
> 
>   http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-3.1/changes.html
> 

Hi Mark,

very good document ... just a very short comment -

I see no mention of Objective-C improvements.

I don't really care, but I'm worried that the document might give the
(false) impression that Objective-C is not actively supported and
maintained.

I'd like a short generic sentence somewhere saying bug fixes and
improvements were done to the Objective-C compiler and GNU runtime library
too. :-)

It's mostly to underline that the language is well alive ... and as a user
of the GNU Objective-C compiler I must say that the GCC 3.x serie of
compilers does contain important improvements which the Objective-C users
has been waiting for quite a long while.

I think the following end-ix86-user relevant improvements were made to the
ObjC compiler and GNU runtime library from 3.0 to 3.1 -

 - linker warnings have been fixed (finally! most users are waiting for
this - thanks Jakub Jelinek again!).

 - if a class method cannot be found, do not issue a warning if a
corresponding instance method exists in the root class.

 - forward @protocol declarations have been fixed.

 - fixed loading of categories in certain situations (GNU runtime only).

 - rewritten the class lookup so that class method dispatch is more than
twice as fast as it used to be (GNU runtime only).

Thanks again to you and everyone who made GCC 3.1 possible and sorry for
always complaining about Objective-C not getting enough attention. :-)