GNUstep Might Deprecate Support For GNU's GCC In Favor Of LLVM Clang

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNUstep Might Deprecate Support For GNU's GCC In Favor Of LLVM Clang

GNUstep, the longstanding GNU Project implementing Apple's Cocoa frameworks, might end up deprecating support for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) to focus its compiler support on LLVM's Clang...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNUstep-Might-Deprecate-GCC

[Guest]

It makes sense to me - it takes a good amount of engineering resources to add good quality language support to a compiler, and if you don't have it, the only good choice is to use what's already there.

[Candy]

It's good to see that niche systems give niche compilers a chance to mature. On all modern Linux systems we stay with gcc because that's what everyone uses.

[tildearrow]

Kind of ironic to see a GNU project deprecating compilation under a GNU compiler.

[CommunityMember]

Typo? "If they had an interesting developer" -> interested developer?

[CommunityMember]

Kind of ironic to see a GNU project deprecating compilation under a GNU compiler.

I consider it more pragmatic than ironic. GNUstep is about the frameworks, and not the compiler, and GCC's support for recent Objective-C is not as robust (i.e. it is lacking features) as compared to LLVM, which should surprise, well, no one.

[kpedersen]

and GCC's support for recent Objective-C is not as robust (i.e. it is lacking features) as compared to LLVM,

Probably true and I imagine that once Swift has disappeared, Apple will get back to Objective-C as a first class citizen.

However for GNUstep, if the GCC support for Objective-C seems to not be good enough, it means that GNUstep are obviously over-consuming features and should stick to some slightly more calm code. They don't need to use the latest and greatest Objective-C feature, and to be honest, chasing features from a commercial company like this is quite likely going to lead to fatigue of the project.

[cybertraveler]

Probably true and I imagine that once Swift has disappeared, Apple will get back to Objective-C as a first class citizen.

Why do you think Swift will disappear?

I haven't studied it in detail, but it looks like a nice language. IIRC, GC is even optional in it, so it can potentially compete with C++, C & Rust for those applications where a GC is problematic / undesirable.

[timofonic]

Objective-C will die, Swift is there to stay.

GNUstep has no reason to exist, it always has been a joke.

This is ridiculous.

[DMJC]

NextSpace is the big beneficiary of this move if it happens. Currently NextSpace has support for Display (Xrandr) and Sound configuration (Pulseaudio) and is focused on getting networking configuration (through Network-Manager) up and running. At that point GNUstep will have a functional desktop environment with many applications, multitab terminal, text editor and programming editors. It already supports rik.theme and etoile's MenuServer.app so it's very easy to create a mac-like environment on Linux.