Re: [cdt-dev] Qt Support?

[Alex Blewitt <alex.blewitt@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 15 Jul 2010, at 01:52, Dave Korn <dave.korn.cygwin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 14/07/2010 22:31, Alex Blewitt wrote:
>> On 13 Jul 2010, at 16:02, Marc Khouzam wrote:
>> 
>>>> *sigh* and that is the solution that will probably be used. There is 
>>>> one single problem with that. Those pretty printers need GDB 7.x which
>>>> does not really work on OS X. So I am stuck with the Apple supplied 
>>>> GDB.
>>> Apparently, there has been some efforts by Tristan Gingold to make GDB
>>> 7.1 work on Mac.  If someone wants to take the ball (I don't have a Mac)
>>> and see if it truly works, I believe we could have a very interesting
>>> debugging solution for Mac.
>> 
>> FWIW GDB (and GCC) support on Mac will be dying out in the very near
>> future. The current shipping version of Xcode (3.2) uses the GCC 4.2
>> runtime as the system default, but with LLVM/Clang 1.5 (aka Clang-60
>> http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/cfe/tags/Apple/clang-60/) and LLVM/Clang
>> 2.0 (which probably will be based on LLVM 2.8) looks like it will be the
>> default for the next big release.
>> 
>> GDB is being replaced with LLDB http://lldb.llvm.org/ and though I imagine
>> GCC 4.2 (with GDB 6.3) will stay on for a while, I doubt that Apple's GCC
>> will be updated again.
> 
>  But regardless what Apple want to do with their toolchain, there's a whole
> bunch of volunteers just recently begun very actively working on upgrading
> upstream GCC and GDB to work well on darwin, so Apple's policy shouldn't
> necessarily guide Eclipse; it's very likely that in the next release or two,
> FSF versions will be working well again on Apple hosts.

The Apple-shipped gcc had already diverged from GNU gcc. In fact, the change to GNU to GPLv3 at gcc 4.3 meant that Apple weren't interested in shipping it in the future from that point. 

Secondly, GNU gcc doesn't have much support for Objective-C 2.0 (aka "modern runtime") or blocks. If blocks were ever adopted by other C compilers (or CDT ;-) then that might help. 

http://clang.llvm.org/docs/BlockLanguageSpec.txt
http://clang.llvm.org/docs/Block-ABI-Apple.txt

Blocks are pretty important to a lot of code (both C and Objective-C) going forward, regardless of what Apple's policy might be. In addition, the 64-bit support (likely default for the next release of OSX) mandates the Obj-C 2 runtime. 

http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/ObjC2_FAQ

I'm not saying that the FSF or volunteers won't get there eventually - but equally well, I don't think FSF's hopes should guide Eclipse either. 

Lastly, note that it's not just Apple interested in clang:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/BuildingFreeBSDWithClang

There's even patches to get it to compile the Linux kernel, tracked at:

http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug?id=4068

So the question is: is CDT interested in only gcc, or other support like lldb and clang?

Alex