Re: [9fans] gcc on plan9

["Corey" <corey_s@qwest.net>]

Disclaimer:  by this point, I have no hope or intent of 'pursuading' 
anybody, I'm just writing this to clarify my position, because I get
the feeling that I've been misunderstood.

On Thursday 08 June 2006 00:08, cej@gli.cas.cz wrote:
> IMHO, I don't see any advantage in having gnustep/openstep/nextstep
> stuff (except, maybe, displayPS/PDF), on Plan9.
>

C has something called a Standard Library, it provides lots of useful
things when programming in C.

Imagine how outlandish it would sound if you said that you "don't see 
any advantage in having C99 stuff on Plan 9"?

The core GNUstep libraries are to Objective-C as the Standard Library
is to C.

I'm _not_ talking about the existing user-land applications built from GNUstep, 
such as Gorm and Mail.app, and <cringe>,  WindowMaker and all that.

Now, I'm not going to argue the subjective merits of objective-c vs. plain c; 
but I'm not the only programmer in the world who prefers an object-oriented 
language, and who enjoys such features as dynamic dispatch/typing/loading, 
reflection, forwarding, etc., etc.


> >For example, GNUstep depends not just on the compiler, but also on many
> > services you find today on Linux and similar UNIXes. Trying to pull that into 
> > Plan 9 would force you to pull many other stuff as well.
> 

Not if I were only interested in having Objective-C -- the _language_, and 
GNUstep -- the _libraries_.

The core GNUstep Libraries - by design - have very minimal dependency 
requirements. For instance, GNUstep GUI depends on libtiff.

libtiff is not going to turn Plan 9 into linux.

And hey, it's already been ported!

http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~mirtchov/p9/libtiff/

Likewise, writing 9P services in Objective-C is not going to turn Plan 9 into
Linux.


Beers,

Corey