Re: Improving GNUstep tooling with Clang

[Frederik Seiffert]

Hi Johannes,

Am 29.11.2019 um 13:06 schrieb Johannes Brakensiek <johannes@brakensiek.info>:

Thanks to the work of Patryk we have a working build setup with CI here now: https://github.com/plaurent/gnustep-build/

Would it be helpful to you if we’d run the tests on the runtime as well?

I think that would be great if you could also run the tests (ideally for at least libobjc2 and libs-base), as it looks like your setups differ from the libs-base CI.

I don’t know if there is anything fundamental broken, but clang 7 is known to not work with the 2.0 runtime as well as the lld linker (you have to use ld.gold). Did you notice Andreas’ paper describing this?

http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Building_GNUstep_under_Debian_FreeBSD

His (and our) build experiences have been collected at the scripts mentioned at the repository above.

That’s very helpful, but it shows pretty well all the (mostly undocumented) things one needs to figure out somehow in order to get the modern runtime to work (e.g. requirement for recent Clang version and Gold linker, modify library-combo.make, various config flags, etc.).

I think ideally these things should be "figured out" by GNUstep make configure, something like:

If Clang version is at least 9 (?) and libobjc2 is detected:

=> select ng-gnu-gnu library combo

=> select gnustep-2.0 runtime

=> enable ARC
=> enable native ObjC exceptions

=> add -fuse-ld=gold to linker flags

Would that make sense? 

Frederik