If you had money to place for a bounty, what would you choose?

[Michel Fortin]

On 2013-12-03 16:55:28 +0000, Manu <turkeyman at gmail.com> said:

> C++ support in D is 'not complete', but what's there now is still very
> important and not considered a bad partial feature to have.
> I'd imagine that likewise, if the 'core' of Obj-C support is solid, then
> maybe it's worth it in the same sense?
> OSX and iOS are 2 of the most popular platforms on earth. The mobile space
> is probably the most important prospective target for D.
> I can't comment on the state it's in. But if what's there is solid and
> useful like the current C++ support, then it's an important start...?

Here are some issues to consider if you ship it right now:

- transitioning to ARC when that is implemented (do we require a 
compiler flag to enable ARC because it was off by default before and 
turning it on changes the semantics?)
- it's 32-bit-OS-X-only right now, iOS and 64-bit OS X both use a 
different runtime which requires different codegen, and Apple has been 
phasing out 32-bit for some time already
- missing categories will force bindings to be somewhat contorted
- missing blocks will make some of the newer Objective-C APIs inaccessible.

It might have been fine to release that thing 3 years ago with a 
promise that it'll improve. But today it's plain outdated on all 
fronts, and if it doesn't come with a believable roadmap about filling 
the gaps it's going to be seen as a clever gimmick that is not 
particularly useful. That's not unlike a 16-bit pre-C++98 compiler is 
not terribly useful today. We're at a transition, and currently on the 
wrong side of it.

The only way to bring it up-to-date is for someone to redo the codegen 
and to design and implement the missing language features. If merging 
it will accomplish that, then by all means go ahead. But I somewhat 
doubt that magically people will start to work a lot more on 
Objective-C support because it has been merged in. I might be wrong 
though.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca