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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T01:05:34+00:00

Clearly C, C++ and Fortran are the classic GNU languages and have full support.

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Clearly C, C++ and Fortran are the classic GNU languages and have full support. I know Erlang was added because the Erlang community worked very hard to add that functionality to the autotools, but what about Objective-C? I think it’s been natively supported for a long time (I vaguely recall it being supported way back in the early 2000s, long before the latest iStuff explosion). Was it because the NeXTSTEP guys worked so hard at it?

I’ve been reading the excellent autotools book by Calcote and they bring up the history of the autotools. It always seemed odd to me that Objective-C had such strong support in the GNU tools given its (until recently) low usage.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Objective-C support in the GCC toolchain dates back to at least 1988. NeXTSTEP shipped with a bunch of random FSF / GNU related tools, almost all of which were configured via autoconf from the beginning.

    IIRC, Objective-C support in the GCC toolchain predates autoconf by a few years.

    Objective-C has always had a relatively enthusiastic following amongst the various neckbeard groups of the ’90s (i.e. those of us who chose not to program Windows or Mac OS). Actually, Objective-C and C++ are roughly about the same age.

    Oh, and….

    Get offa my lawn.

    🙂

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