Re: NSDecrementExtraRefCountWasZero

[David Chisnall]

On 3 Dec 2017, at 10:01, Andreas Fink <afink@list.fink.org> wrote:
> 
> Which raises the question on how many people use Objective C and still use 
> GCC?

I haven’t for a long time, but last time we discussed it some people were very 
vocal about keeping GCC support.  

> If you use ObjectiveC 2.0 features such as automatic properties or ARC, you 
> for sure will use clang. GCC is a real deal breaker there.

GCC does support declared properties, but it doesn’t support ARC.  I’ve spoken 
to someone who is interested in adding ARC support to GCC a couple of times, 
but he’s always been too busy with other projects to get around to it (they had 
a customer who wanted blocks in GCC, so he was working on that and became 
interested in ARC).  ARC is a very complex feature to get right (there are 
complex rules about how scopes relate to lifetimes, which are part of the 
reason why ARC saves a lot of code)

> In my project, ARC made a lot of stuff a lot simpler to code and avoided a 
> lot of human errors. ARC saves your there.
> 
> I'm not sure who else uses GNUStep-base in what scenario and if supporting 
> GCC is still kind of a important thing to keep around or not.

I think being able to use ARC in -gui and -base would save us a lot of effort, 
but the biggest gain would be being able to delete a load of compatibility code.

That said, I’d be far more inclined to suggest that we depend on Objective-C++ 
and libobjc2 than clang.  GSIMap, for example, is quite painful to use and 
would be a lot cleaner in C++.  In other code bases, I can simply do things 
like std::unordered_map<int, id __weak> and all of the memory management works 
correctly.  Before we had reliable ARC support, I had some C++ strong_object 
and weak_object wrappers that called the relevant runtime functions in their 
constructors and destructors (and, for weak, implemented an implicit cast 
operator to a strong object type that called the function to materialise a 
strong reference).

David