Objective-C bugs and GCC releases

[Mark Mitchell]

Adrian Robert wrote:
>>In fairness, the Steering Committe did however make a conscious
>>decision not to designate Objective-C a release-critical language.
>>That is because there are more features in GCC (support for
>>languages, chips, optimizations, etc.)  than there are people to
>>maintain them all -- especially to keep them all working all the
>>time in all possible cross products.
> 
> 
> Thank you for taking the time to clarify the situation.  But..
> 
> Regardless of how you sugar-coat it, designating a language as not
> release critical means in practice you can't rely on GCC going
> forward for that language. 

I might tend to agree -- unless you actively intervene.

I see that Robert Dewar replied.  Ada is not a release-critical 
language; yet, I can assure you that AdaCore (the company Robert 
co-owns) very much expects that an Ada compiler based on GCC will exist 
for the indefinite future.  That is in part because he knows that the SC 
will not actively interfere with AdaCore working on GNU Ada (the SC 
likes to support more languages!) and also because he knows that AdaCore 
will make sufficient resources available to do the development.

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.

-- 
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
mark@codesourcery.com
(916) 791-8304