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Thoughts on Objective-C and how it might/should evolve
- devmonk 16y agoHow about Obj-C that eliminates all of the memory alloc/dealloc and runs in the JVM? ;) Ok, that sounds just awful as I doubt much would port well. But, it doesn't seem to make any sense to reinvent the wheel. Recent JVMs handle garbage collection fairly well. How about ditching all of the Obj-C and rewriting Cocoa (for OS X and iOS) in Java? Easier said than done. I say just embrace the fact that everything in OS X/iOS today is using a somewhat fast but somewhat archaic language, and just make XCode better able to spot memory leaks in code.
- scrod 16y agoIt's (mostly) already been done — Apple called it the Cocoa-Java bridge: http://cocoadevcentral.com/articles/000024.php http://cocoadevcentral.com/articles/000024.php It became officially deprecated about five years ago, but quite a few important apps used it, Cyberduck (http://cyberduck.ch/ http://cyberduck.ch/) being one of them.
- xsmasher 16y agoApple won't abandon objective-C any time soon - the ongoing evolution of the language (properties, blocks) and platform (garbage collection) imply that they're in it for the long haul. The switch to LLVM also suggests... something. A switch to a new (virtualized?) platform with the same API / language is more likely.