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Being on gcc, a long-lived platform, also helps ensure the survival of the language even if development of the current compiler (or LLVM) dies or withers.

• duckerude 4y ago
  Does it? GCC's Java frontend died and is no longer shipped, they need maintainers like any other compiler.
  • genewitch 4y ago
    GCJ is no more? It was being used within recent memory for things, i thought. I am out of the loop though, so if this is true, that's interesting and a bit weird.
    • pjmlp 4y ago
      Since 2009 actually. Most contributors eventually moved into OpenJDK after it became available. GCC folks left it around for a couple of years, because GCJ unit tests exercised parts of the compiler no one else did. Eventually they decided it wasn't worth that maintenance cost to keep it around only for that purpose.
• apple4ever 4y ago
  GCC support of Objective-C is very very poor.
  • pjmlp 4y ago
    It is at the level NeXT was forced to contribute back to upstream.
  • astrange 4y ago
    Reimplementing ObjC 2.0 would be very hard. You have to be precisely bug-compatible with Clang to implement ARC correctly.