Re: Oolite a GNUstep-based game released on MS Store and FlatHub

Hi Riccardo,

The framerate of the game was reported by the main Windows dev to be 
significantly higher with a clang build than with a gcc build. I'm not 
sure about Linux.

I've noticed GNUstep is set up for gcc out of the box on Arch and 
Ubuntu. Why does the out of the box compiler on these systems prevent 
the GNUstep packages being provided built with clang eg. by specifying 
clang as a dependency?

The game runs on Windows or Linux x86_64 and doesn't support ARM 
currently. To get the architecture benefit of gcc would require someone 
to make a port on to a new architecture which we'd welcome. We would 
like to get the game working again on Mac in future.

Cheers,
Mike

On 24/02/2026 09:28, Riccardo Mottola wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Michael Rans wrote:
>>
>> Yes it can still be built with gcc and I believe the Arch release 
>> still uses it so that it can use the default GNUstep base. From what 
>> I have heard, performance is better for the clang version.
> that is good.
> Performance of the game or generally in GNUstep? Clang runtime has 
> some specific optimizations gcc is still lacking. Could be that your 
> game code benefits from them?
> However in general desktop usage I found gcc to perform better.
>
>>
>> May I ask why you want to continue building it with gcc rather than 
>> clang? The reason I ask is that I had been considering whether the 
>> game should become clang only to allow usage of Objective-C syntax 
>> improvements in the modern clang runtime. 
>
> Many reasons, it is an often recurring topic. Major reasons:
> - on several platforms gcc is just easier to install and setup, albeit 
> on certain others, clang+libobjc2 is quick and easy
> - platform support, gcc supports certain OS & architecture 
> combinations that libobcj2 does not or has major bugs on
> - out-of-the-box compiler. FreeBSD and OpenBSD (on most archs at 
> least) default to clang as system compiler, NetBSD or Debian default 
> to gcc. Other compilers are available, but as an extra
>
>
> Riccardo