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GObject is a real tragedy of the NIH syndrome in open source. In the late 1990s there already was Objective-C. It already had open source compiler support, a b

by pavlov 4y ago

GObject is a real tragedy of the NIH syndrome in open source. In the late 1990s there already was Objective-C. It already had open source compiler support, a battle-tested runtime, a free software desktop environment, and a corporate sponsor that became the world’s most valuable corporation. Instead of using what was already there, the Linux GUI community extracted a poor shadow of Obj-C out of the GIMP image processing program (itself a poor shadow of a commercial market leader).

tannhaeuser 4y ago
I've always wondered why GNUstep didn't work out; would've been a fantastic way of porting Mac OS apps, in theory at least. I guess that is what you're saying as well.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
GIMP development started in 1995. The GNU Objective C frontend (the one that has stayed in use) started in 1993. I would hardly consider the GIMP developers (who became the early developers of GTK) to be rash in their option not to adopt a language that had only been available for a couple of years in the open source world. And all these years later, at a time when Apple has essentially abandoned Objective C, GTK and Glib continue to provide bindings for dozens of languages to create cross-platform GUI applications, and even if many of us don't agree with the direction(s) it has taken, GTK itself has continued to evolve, whereas UI libraries that came with Objective C have become frozen in time. So in short, not really a tragedy at all.
- kennywinker 4y ago
  Apple has not abandoned Objective C. It still has first class support on all their platforms, and the vast majority of their OS frameworks and applications are developed in ObjC. Swift is growing as an internal tool, but it’s nowhere near even 50% of the 1st party code on a mac or iphone. Improvements have slowed on ObjC, as Apple’s focus switched to swift - ObjC 2.0 in 2014 was the last major change.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    Also the most popular iOS third-party apps are all Obj-C[++]. The C++ interop is very important for companies like Meta. They have no incentive to rewrite anything in Swift. If you look at minutes spent by end users on the iOS platform, I’m guessing it’s at least 95% inside Obj-C apps today.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Which is exactly why Apple showed the following at WWDC 2022, just to make it clear that the time for Objective-C is done. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/102/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/102/ > The Objective-C language, AppKit & UIKit frameworks, and Interface Builder have empowered generations of developers. These technologies were built for each other, and will continue to serve us well for a long time to come, but over time new abstractions become necessary. For a while now, you've seen us hard at work defining the next generation of integrated language, frameworks, and tools: Swift, SwiftUI, and Xcode Previews. > Tight integration in a development platform like this requires that all three pieces be designed and evolved together, both driving and driven by one another. Swift result builders were inspired by SwiftUI's compositional structure. SwiftUI's declarative views were enabled by Swift value types. And Xcode Previews was specifically designed for, and enabled by, both. Now, the result is the best development platform that we have ever built. And this year, Swift, SwiftUI, and Xcode all have fantastic updates that take this vision further, and make it even easier for you to build great apps for all of our platforms. And it all starts with Swift.
      - aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
        Nah. I’ll believe it when I see it. Only when Apple comes out with a flagship app written in Swift (I would require SwiftUI too, but I don’t want to be that cruel…) will I entertain the idea that ObjC can be replaced. If they were eating their own dogfood internally, they should be aware that it is nowhere near ready for AAA app development.
        pjmlp 4y ago
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  > I would hardly consider the GIMP developers (who became the early developers of GTK) to be rash in their option not to adopt a language that had only been available for a couple of years in the open source world. I think you misunderstood the criticism. They didn't say GIMP used the wrong model when it started, they said the greater community was wrong for copying GIMP later on. > And all these years later, at a time when Apple has essentially abandoned Objective C, GTK and Glib continue to provide bindings for dozens of languages to create cross-platform GUI applications, and even if many of us don't agree with the direction(s) it has taken, GTK itself has continued to evolve, whereas UI libraries that came with Objective C have become frozen in time. The suggestion is that Objective C should have been used instead of GObject. That doesn't mean having to use any particular libraries. And the same work to bind and evolve could have been poured into any reasonably solid library.
  - bonzini 4y ago
    They did not copy GIMP, they literally extracted the widget code out of GIMP (and with it the object model) and made it into an independent toolkit. At the time there was no decent free toolkit at all, people were trying to reimplement Motif (Lesstif) or Qt (Harmony) but GIMP's was the first free software toolkit for X11. Then over time it was extended beyond widgets, and the tooling around it grew to focus on exporting introspection information for language bindings.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    My guess is that you can't point to a single example of a library written in ObjC that has any other language bindings, and if you can, it is barely used by anyone. The GTK community always made the idea of language bindings a central part of their development ethos.
- cannam 4y ago
  > GIMP development started in 1995. The GNU Objective C frontend (the one that has stayed in use) started in 1993. I would hardly consider the GIMP developers (who became the early developers of GTK) to be rash in their option not to adopt a language that had only been available for a couple of years in the open source world. Early in 1997, Guillaume Laurent and I spent some time looking into Objective C as a possible language for the "next version" of the Rosegarden sequencer on Unix/X11. At the time Rosegarden was a C application[1] using Athena widgets with my own little styling library, and we were sure there must be better options and were prepared to rewrite the UI entirely if we had to. We ended up ruling it out for a few reasons, which I've just looked up in old email archives. I had some trouble getting the then-new gcc Objective C runtime working across Unix systems (we didn't only target Linux) and feared that we wouldn't be able to give our code to someone else and have them compile it easily. We couldn't find a working graphical toolkit: we thought GNUstep wasn't ready and also that it was probably going to be overkill. Other possibilities like NSXKit[2] weren't there either. Guillaume experimented with writing a toolkit himself but quickly ran into various obstacles that I don't have a record of. (What is striking in hindsight is how hard it was to find reliable information to help us make a decision like this. There was documentation, and there were opinions, but there was very little of the form "we used this for our project and here's how it worked" that you would begin to see after blogging had become commonplace. We worked mostly on supposition and projection - install something, see if we could get it to build at all, spend a couple of hours with it and make guesses based on that, as well as on external info such as how much we knew about the developers that worked on it.) So we switched to C++ instead. Considered Qt, argued about it, looked at LessTif, then GTK, then contributed a bit to gtkmm, then after a couple of years of nominally using gtkmm and getting nothing done, we switched to Qt after all and were happy. Happy-ish. Even for people who really liked Objective C in 1997, it was pretty hard to make a case for. Maybe an open source company with staff and capital could have, but they barely existed. [1] https://all-day-breakfast.com/cannam/x11-rosegarden/rosegarden-2.1pl4.tar.gz https://all-day-breakfast.com/cannam/x11-rosegarden/rosegard... [2] http://www.hardcoreprocessing.com/home/anoq/Programming/GNUStep.html http://www.hardcoreprocessing.com/home/anoq/Programming/GNUS...
vkazanov 4y ago
How so? You probably don't understand the context of mid-90s free and open software. Nothing is free, nothing open, relevant business models do not yet exist. Few things that are open barely work: linux takes hours to compile-tweak-recompile, all the tools are half-baked and semi-broken. You had to fix most things yourself. Anyways, the only tools that do work reliably and have no license issues are coming from FSF: Emacs, gcc, unix utils, etc. Note that objC was not free, and the free version sucked most of the time. GCC did have world-class support for C though. C was and still is a good choice for a core portable cross-language library. But UIs are probably the only programming context where OOP fits well. So people came with Gobject. It all makes total sense, and that's why the whole thing survives to this very day.
- pavlov 4y ago
  > “C was and still is a good choice for a core portable cross-language library. But UIs are probably the only programming context where OOP fits well. So people came with Gobject.” That’s my exact criticism: they came up with GObject instead of using the C-based solution that already existed, had open source compiler support, and was actively developed by Apple. The GTK community made a huge mistake in trying to turn GIMP’s poor design into a generic GUI framework rather than collaborating with GNUstep on creating a next-generation framework.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Apple would never collaborated with GNUStep, first of all, when GNUStep started NeXT was still around. Secondly, Steve Jobs wasn't an happy fellow about the whole story regarding GCC request to get back the frontend changes into upstream. Gtk OOP is actually a clone of Motif OOP, which Gtk was cloning in first place.
    - pavlov 4y ago
      They wouldn’t have needed Apple’s collaboration to build a new UI framework on Obj-C, just like nobody needed SCO’s permission to build Linux. GTK’s two original sins were 1) cloning Motif in the first place, 2) doubling down on that design instead of throwing away GIMP as the prototype that it was. They’ve been forever reliving the 1990s due to these bad choices.
sampo 4y ago
> In the late 1990s there already was Objective-C. Objective-C is closer to the original, or at least early, Alan Kay and Smalltalk flavor of object oriented languages. In the late 1990s, we had already had 10 years of C++, so the C++ flavor "C with classes" type of object oriented programming was more familiar to most people. I'd guess already then, the Smalltalk flavor of Objective-C felt a bit alien to many, who had grown familiar with the C++ flavor.
mhd 4y ago
> GObject is a real tragedy of the NIH syndrome in open source. It is, but I wouldn't look at Objective-C as the previous invention. X11 already hat the Toolkit Intrinsics (Xt), and it's not like they were unknown to the developers, the first version of Gimp having been written in Motif. A new toolkit in the vein of Xaw/Motif/OLIT would've been a more immediate choice, but then again, no two persons seem to have the same preferences when it comes to object-orientation. (I'm sitting in the proverbial glasshouse here, having switched my own "let's make some widgets for Qt 0.x" project to "let's reinvent X11 toolkits" in the mid to late 90s)

by pavlov 4y ago

tannhaeuser 4y ago

I've always wondered why GNUstep didn't work out; would've been a fantastic way of porting Mac OS apps, in theory at least. I guess that is what you're saying as well.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

GIMP development started in 1995. The GNU Objective C frontend (the one that has stayed in use) started in 1993. I would hardly consider the GIMP developers (who became the early developers of GTK) to be rash in their option not to adopt a language that had only been available for a couple of years in the open source world. And all these years later, at a time when Apple has essentially abandoned Objective C, GTK and Glib continue to provide bindings for dozens of languages to create cross-platform GUI applications, and even if many of us don't agree with the direction(s) it has taken, GTK itself has continued to evolve, whereas UI libraries that came with Objective C have become frozen in time. So in short, not really a tragedy at all.

kennywinker 4y ago
Apple has not abandoned Objective C. It still has first class support on all their platforms, and the vast majority of their OS frameworks and applications are developed in ObjC. Swift is growing as an internal tool, but it’s nowhere near even 50% of the 1st party code on a mac or iphone. Improvements have slowed on ObjC, as Apple’s focus switched to swift - ObjC 2.0 in 2014 was the last major change.
- pavlov 4y ago
  Also the most popular iOS third-party apps are all Obj-C[++]. The C++ interop is very important for companies like Meta. They have no incentive to rewrite anything in Swift. If you look at minutes spent by end users on the iOS platform, I’m guessing it’s at least 95% inside Obj-C apps today.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Which is exactly why Apple showed the following at WWDC 2022, just to make it clear that the time for Objective-C is done. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/102/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/102/ > The Objective-C language, AppKit & UIKit frameworks, and Interface Builder have empowered generations of developers. These technologies were built for each other, and will continue to serve us well for a long time to come, but over time new abstractions become necessary. For a while now, you've seen us hard at work defining the next generation of integrated language, frameworks, and tools: Swift, SwiftUI, and Xcode Previews. > Tight integration in a development platform like this requires that all three pieces be designed and evolved together, both driving and driven by one another. Swift result builders were inspired by SwiftUI's compositional structure. SwiftUI's declarative views were enabled by Swift value types. And Xcode Previews was specifically designed for, and enabled by, both. Now, the result is the best development platform that we have ever built. And this year, Swift, SwiftUI, and Xcode all have fantastic updates that take this vision further, and make it even easier for you to build great apps for all of our platforms. And it all starts with Swift.
    - aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
      Nah. I’ll believe it when I see it. Only when Apple comes out with a flagship app written in Swift (I would require SwiftUI too, but I don’t want to be that cruel…) will I entertain the idea that ObjC can be replaced. If they were eating their own dogfood internally, they should be aware that it is nowhere near ready for AAA app development.
      - pjmlp 4y ago
Dylan16807 4y ago
> I would hardly consider the GIMP developers (who became the early developers of GTK) to be rash in their option not to adopt a language that had only been available for a couple of years in the open source world. I think you misunderstood the criticism. They didn't say GIMP used the wrong model when it started, they said the greater community was wrong for copying GIMP later on. > And all these years later, at a time when Apple has essentially abandoned Objective C, GTK and Glib continue to provide bindings for dozens of languages to create cross-platform GUI applications, and even if many of us don't agree with the direction(s) it has taken, GTK itself has continued to evolve, whereas UI libraries that came with Objective C have become frozen in time. The suggestion is that Objective C should have been used instead of GObject. That doesn't mean having to use any particular libraries. And the same work to bind and evolve could have been poured into any reasonably solid library.
- bonzini 4y ago
  They did not copy GIMP, they literally extracted the widget code out of GIMP (and with it the object model) and made it into an independent toolkit. At the time there was no decent free toolkit at all, people were trying to reimplement Motif (Lesstif) or Qt (Harmony) but GIMP's was the first free software toolkit for X11. Then over time it was extended beyond widgets, and the tooling around it grew to focus on exporting introspection information for language bindings.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  My guess is that you can't point to a single example of a library written in ObjC that has any other language bindings, and if you can, it is barely used by anyone. The GTK community always made the idea of language bindings a central part of their development ethos.
cannam 4y ago
> GIMP development started in 1995. The GNU Objective C frontend (the one that has stayed in use) started in 1993. I would hardly consider the GIMP developers (who became the early developers of GTK) to be rash in their option not to adopt a language that had only been available for a couple of years in the open source world. Early in 1997, Guillaume Laurent and I spent some time looking into Objective C as a possible language for the "next version" of the Rosegarden sequencer on Unix/X11. At the time Rosegarden was a C application[1] using Athena widgets with my own little styling library, and we were sure there must be better options and were prepared to rewrite the UI entirely if we had to. We ended up ruling it out for a few reasons, which I've just looked up in old email archives. I had some trouble getting the then-new gcc Objective C runtime working across Unix systems (we didn't only target Linux) and feared that we wouldn't be able to give our code to someone else and have them compile it easily. We couldn't find a working graphical toolkit: we thought GNUstep wasn't ready and also that it was probably going to be overkill. Other possibilities like NSXKit[2] weren't there either. Guillaume experimented with writing a toolkit himself but quickly ran into various obstacles that I don't have a record of. (What is striking in hindsight is how hard it was to find reliable information to help us make a decision like this. There was documentation, and there were opinions, but there was very little of the form "we used this for our project and here's how it worked" that you would begin to see after blogging had become commonplace. We worked mostly on supposition and projection - install something, see if we could get it to build at all, spend a couple of hours with it and make guesses based on that, as well as on external info such as how much we knew about the developers that worked on it.) So we switched to C++ instead. Considered Qt, argued about it, looked at LessTif, then GTK, then contributed a bit to gtkmm, then after a couple of years of nominally using gtkmm and getting nothing done, we switched to Qt after all and were happy. Happy-ish. Even for people who really liked Objective C in 1997, it was pretty hard to make a case for. Maybe an open source company with staff and capital could have, but they barely existed. [1] https://all-day-breakfast.com/cannam/x11-rosegarden/rosegarden-2.1pl4.tar.gz https://all-day-breakfast.com/cannam/x11-rosegarden/rosegard... [2] http://www.hardcoreprocessing.com/home/anoq/Programming/GNUStep.html http://www.hardcoreprocessing.com/home/anoq/Programming/GNUS...

vkazanov 4y ago

How so? You probably don't understand the context of mid-90s free and open software. Nothing is free, nothing open, relevant business models do not yet exist. Few things that are open barely work: linux takes hours to compile-tweak-recompile, all the tools are half-baked and semi-broken. You had to fix most things yourself. Anyways, the only tools that do work reliably and have no license issues are coming from FSF: Emacs, gcc, unix utils, etc. Note that objC was not free, and the free version sucked most of the time. GCC did have world-class support for C though. C was and still is a good choice for a core portable cross-language library. But UIs are probably the only programming context where OOP fits well. So people came with Gobject. It all makes total sense, and that's why the whole thing survives to this very day.

pavlov 4y ago
> “C was and still is a good choice for a core portable cross-language library. But UIs are probably the only programming context where OOP fits well. So people came with Gobject.” That’s my exact criticism: they came up with GObject instead of using the C-based solution that already existed, had open source compiler support, and was actively developed by Apple. The GTK community made a huge mistake in trying to turn GIMP’s poor design into a generic GUI framework rather than collaborating with GNUstep on creating a next-generation framework.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Apple would never collaborated with GNUStep, first of all, when GNUStep started NeXT was still around. Secondly, Steve Jobs wasn't an happy fellow about the whole story regarding GCC request to get back the frontend changes into upstream. Gtk OOP is actually a clone of Motif OOP, which Gtk was cloning in first place.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    They wouldn’t have needed Apple’s collaboration to build a new UI framework on Obj-C, just like nobody needed SCO’s permission to build Linux. GTK’s two original sins were 1) cloning Motif in the first place, 2) doubling down on that design instead of throwing away GIMP as the prototype that it was. They’ve been forever reliving the 1990s due to these bad choices.

sampo 4y ago

> In the late 1990s there already was Objective-C. Objective-C is closer to the original, or at least early, Alan Kay and Smalltalk flavor of object oriented languages. In the late 1990s, we had already had 10 years of C++, so the C++ flavor "C with classes" type of object oriented programming was more familiar to most people. I'd guess already then, the Smalltalk flavor of Objective-C felt a bit alien to many, who had grown familiar with the C++ flavor.

mhd 4y ago

> GObject is a real tragedy of the NIH syndrome in open source. It is, but I wouldn't look at Objective-C as the previous invention. X11 already hat the Toolkit Intrinsics (Xt), and it's not like they were unknown to the developers, the first version of Gimp having been written in Motif. A new toolkit in the vein of Xaw/Motif/OLIT would've been a more immediate choice, but then again, no two persons seem to have the same preferences when it comes to object-orientation. (I'm sitting in the proverbial glasshouse here, having switched my own "let's make some widgets for Qt 0.x" project to "let's reinvent X11 toolkits" in the mid to late 90s)