Re: ANN: One Step to GNUstep - pre-release version 0.9

[Richard Stonehouse]

On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 08:40:14PM +0200, Ivan Vučica wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 18:40, Richard Stonehouse <richard@rstonehouse.co.uk
> > wrote:
> 
> >
> > What sort of developer would you see as having need of clang and
> > Objective C 2?
> >
> 
> I'm not really interested in clang per se, but it does bring Objective-C
> 2.0.
> 
> I'm interested in using GNUstep as an educational environment for developing
> GUI applications. While by itself GNUstep currently has only limited appeal
> (primarily limited to enthusiasts like me, but of course not exclusively),
> it could be a very neat educational environment.
> 
> I'm viewing GNUstep as a Mac OS X -->alternative<--... at least for my
> needs. Not because GNUstep is bad, but because Mac OS X is still ;) better.
> Primarily this is due to Gorm being a bit clumsy to use (despite being
> technically excellent), and Project Center being very, very clumsy to use.
> No matter, in the organization I'm working with, there are tons of PCs since
> Macs are too expensive. Having GNUstep that "just works" would be great.
> 
> Objective-C 2.0 would allow me to initially skip over setter and getter
> methods. Initially, because they are of course essential, but if I'm talking
> to kids who are coming from Logo/BASIC/C/C++ background primarily solving
> algorithmic tasks on various contests, then complicating their life by
> explaining reference counting, setter and getter methods just to get them
> introduced to "practical" GUI programming,

Thanks, that's very useful to know. It knocks on the head the theory
I was developing, that Objective C 2.0 is needed by 'power users' who
know what a fragile ABI is rather than 'novice users' who might be
enticed in by an easily installable VM. The 'novice users' need it
too. So ... it looks like we want Objective C 2.0, through clang or
GCC 4.6 or (I think preferably) both.

> Objective-C 2.0 is not essential, but it is quite handy.
> 
> Would this be in place of, or in addition to, the gcc compiler and
> > libobjc?
> >
> 
> I don't see how clang would conflict with gcc. In fact, as I said, I'm not
> primarily interested in clang per se; gcc 4.6 is equally useful for my
> needs.

So if, say, the base libraries were compiled with GCC 4.6, this
wouldn't stop users doing their development in clang if they so wish.

-- 
    Richard Stonehouse