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Looks very nice, and god knows it would be nice to have a next generation replacement for obj-c, but... 1. Obj-c may be verbose but XCode 4 does a lot of the h

Looks very nice, and god knows it would be nice to have a next generation replacement for obj-c, but... 1. Obj-c may be verbose but XCode 4 does a lot of the heavy lifting with templates, snippets, and auto-completion, not to mention the continuous feedback on errors. It doesn't feel anywhere near as heavy as it looks. How much of that is available in LUA? 2. What does the picture look like when you want to access C api's and not just send messages? One of the most positive aspects of Obj-C is that you can use C libraries directly without either performance or code overhead - e.g. OpenGL, CoreGraphics, not to mention all manner of OSS C-libraries.

dchest 16y ago
2. AFAIK, Wax requires wrappers for C functions. There's another modern variant of Lua bindings for ObjC (aimed mostly at Mac instead of iOS) -- http://playcontrol.net/opensource/LuaCocoa/ http://playcontrol.net/opensource/LuaCocoa/ It uses BridgeSupport and libffi.
rbarooah 16y ago
And another thing - what about debugging. Are we back to just logging? Personally a slightly simpler syntax for the message sending layer in Objective-C just doesn't seem to give that much leverage. I'd much rather see a functional language properly integrated à la F#.
- koko775 16y ago
  Try an interactive shell! http://probablyinteractive.com/2010/8/20/ios-interactive-console.html http://probablyinteractive.com/2010/8/20/ios-interactive-con... I'm planning on trying it out whenever I get time.
cageface 16y ago
I share your reservations about the loss of XCode functionality. The verbosity of Obj-C and the Cocoa APIs is mitigated to a large degree by code completion and integrated documentation. Losing that, the visual debugger, and, presumably, the tight integration with Instruments would be a big productivity loss.
- rbarooah 16y ago
  Right - also there doesn't seem to be a story for closures and GCD.
blub 16y ago
"Obj-c may be verbose but XCode 4 does a lot of the heavy lifting with templates, snippets, and auto-completion," That's exactly what was said about Java or MFC. Instead of staring at your own verbose code you're now staring at the auto-generated verbose code.

dchest 16y ago

2. AFAIK, Wax requires wrappers for C functions. There's another modern variant of Lua bindings for ObjC (aimed mostly at Mac instead of iOS) -- http://playcontrol.net/opensource/LuaCocoa/ http://playcontrol.net/opensource/LuaCocoa/ It uses BridgeSupport and libffi.

rbarooah 16y ago

And another thing - what about debugging. Are we back to just logging? Personally a slightly simpler syntax for the message sending layer in Objective-C just doesn't seem to give that much leverage. I'd much rather see a functional language properly integrated à la F#.

koko775 16y ago
Try an interactive shell! http://probablyinteractive.com/2010/8/20/ios-interactive-console.html http://probablyinteractive.com/2010/8/20/ios-interactive-con... I'm planning on trying it out whenever I get time.

cageface 16y ago

I share your reservations about the loss of XCode functionality. The verbosity of Obj-C and the Cocoa APIs is mitigated to a large degree by code completion and integrated documentation. Losing that, the visual debugger, and, presumably, the tight integration with Instruments would be a big productivity loss.

rbarooah 16y ago
Right - also there doesn't seem to be a story for closures and GCD.

blub 16y ago

"Obj-c may be verbose but XCode 4 does a lot of the heavy lifting with templates, snippets, and auto-completion," That's exactly what was said about Java or MFC. Instead of staring at your own verbose code you're now staring at the auto-generated verbose code.