Objective-C bugs and GCC releases

[Daniel Berlin]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, 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.  And when there are manpower shortages,
> the situation is not likely to improve -- rather, the gaps that need
> to be filled for support to return will increase.

How many times does it have to be said that GCC is a volunteer project.

Regardless of how you classify objective C, release critical or not, 
people are not going to start randomly fixing objective C bugs.

The only way objective C will be up to snuff, regardless of whether it is 
classified as a release critical platform or not, is if people who care 
about it contribute patches.

It's that simple.
--Dan