You can use either clang or gcc. ObjC v2 is supported. There is currently no interoperability with swift, but that is coming and you can just build using your .xcodeproj file if you build and install buildtool+libs-xcode. How's that?
Which of course means it's in no way ambiguous or overly used. One syntax for one purpose. Until dot notation was used for @property you never had to guess if you were looking at a structure or at a class. See how that works?
Greg—the funny thing is that the comment I read the comment where they explain notation differences as sort of saying that Smalltalk is the best thing on the planet and we should all aspire to be Smalltalk. No ambiguity with Smalltalk which is of course the whole point of readable, paintable code. The most easily maintainable code is that which does not need documentation.
On Smalltalk: Objective-C of course aspires to be Smalltalk. It just so happens that it's happy to be a muggle and integrate C as well. Good for us. Use Smalltalk for most things and C where necessary.
Not dead at all. I have been working with a number of companies to help them use it. Surprising definition of dead. ;) Join us, be part of the solution!
That is precisely why... it's new ground. It's fun. It's interesting. Why write applications (or, in your words "bikeshedding" -- an interesting term, I had to look it up. :))... because it's a chance to create something totally new. The mission is two fold:
1) Bring the elegance of easy development to every other operating system... and
2) Give Apple developers someplace else to deploy their applications.
GNUstep is meant to be a drop in replacement for Cocoa. By Cocoa I mean Foundation and AppKit, not all of the Core this and Core that libraries. We have those, but they are less mature than Foundation and AppKit. GNUstep is also themable, as I have pointed out in other responses.
Well, that is a noble goal. Hope you can manage even portion of it.
Would be nice to have a way to deploy macOS applications on other platforms, but seeing it is already difficult enough to make sure macOS applications even work on different versions of macOS, that is a difficult task to achieve.
But godspeed to your project, Objective-C, Cocoa and the whole NeXTSTep visual identity is a nice combo.
