[tomjakubowski]

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]

Does it? GCC's Java frontend died and is no longer shipped, they need maintainers like any other compiler.

[genewitch]

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]

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]

GCC support of Objective-C is very very poor.

[pjmlp]

It is at the level NeXT was forced to contribute back to upstream.

[astrange]

Reimplementing ObjC 2.0 would be very hard. You have to be precisely bug-compatible with Clang to implement ARC correctly.