Objective C

[TomorrowPlusX]

Hi
I recently began to study up on objective c; after many happy years of c++ I've realized that there are some things which objective c might do better, and as such could make my life a little easier (the elusive goal of the archetypical coder/hacker ;)

However, I'm not 100% certain how to go about getting an objective c developer/runtime environment on my machine.

First, I'm using gcc 2.95 and I suspect it doesn't have objective c support at all. Does this mean I have to upgrade to gcc 3.x?

Second, the objective c runtime (sys-devel/objc-<package>) is listed as masked when I do an emerge -s on "objc" (I could be a little wrong, I'm at work, on a win2k box). But I can't find those packages in my package.mask.

So -- anybody have any suggestions? Are there USE vars which will promote objective c gcc support and so on?

[Jesse]

http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/

and more specifically ...
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-2.95.3/gcc.html

You can start there, as that should be required reading anyhow

[TomorrowPlusX]

Actually, I've already read most of this via the info pages -- though admittedly, I just picked up a bit I hadn't before, as most of my previous info page traversals have been to look up obscure linking issues and whatnot.

My concern is that gcc *should* be built with objective c automatically, and the headers and runtime should just be there, but it doesn't seem to have been, since I'm missing /usr/include/objc -- so even if gcc knows how to compile an objective c .m file, it won't link it.

A quick "locate objc" reveals that I don't have the runtime or headers. So it's moot.

Does anybody know how to solve this? I'm not particularly excited by the idea of manually installing gcc, though I will if I have to.