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Hot-take from someone who is currently helping to port GNUStep's implementation of the Foundation framework to the Sega Dreamcast: Gross. The whole appeal of F

Hot-take from someone who is currently helping to port GNUStep's implementation of the Foundation framework to the Sega Dreamcast: Gross. The whole appeal of Foundation was having this incredibly convenient, beautiful, high-level object-oriented API ontop of low-level, statically compiled performant C... The true path forward for computing is clearly an alliance among the holy trinity of god's C languages: C, C++, and Objective-C. Yes, the future is in Objective-C++'s hands.

ridiculous_fish 3y ago
Objective-C++ is underrated.
- gyrovorbis 3y ago
  It really is a beautiful language, and some of the most powerful aspects of Swift are due to its Objective-C roots.
xenadu02 3y ago
Foundation has not been a pure layer on top of CoreFoundation for over a decade. Some class implementations are unified on the ObjC version, not the pure C CoreFoundation version. Objective-C got good enough that all processes on Apple platforms have the objc runtime in their address space whether they want it or not and many pure C or CF-like frameworks are built on ObjC under the covers.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  I mean it’s there by virtue of the shared cache, but if we’re talking about what actually gets “loaded” I believe it’s still possible to write binaries that don’t bring in libobjc.
- mpweiher 3y ago
  Objective-C was always "good enough", and in fact the rewrite from an Objective-C Foundation to the C-based CoreFoundation saw a huge regression: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.next.advocacy/c/uOQnC1xE0AQ# https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.next.advocacy/c/uOQnC1x... The objections to Objective-C at Apple were always political, not technical, with a very entrenched "no Objective-C, ever" faction. Took a quarter of a century, but it looks like they finally won.
  - gyrovorbis 3y ago
    Wow, thank you for sharing! Dude, clicked your profile links, and wtf? Objective-S looks awesome! I had never even heard of it, but creating a more easy-to-use language ontop of the Obj-C runtime is epic! I actually wrote my own C-based meta type system for giving my core library and applications that use it a language-independent object-oriented C layer for interop. That's actually how I discovered the magic that is Objective-C and how powerful the C runtime actually is... that's why I'm sad to see it slowly disappear, and anything like this that keeps it alive and uses it is really cool to me. :) I just wrote unit tests for making sure the Objective-C runtime is working and doesn't accidentally get broken in the indie SDK, KallistiOS, for the Sega Dreamcast: https://github.com/KallistiOS/KallistiOS/pull/202 https://github.com/KallistiOS/KallistiOS/pull/202, haha.
lloydatkinson 3y ago
Somehow I doubt porting MacOS to old game consoles was Apple's priority when making this decision.
- gyrovorbis 3y ago
  I'm not porting MacOS. I'm porting just the Foundation layer, and I'm not using Apple's implementation, I'm using GNUStep's. But hey, maybe having a core, foundational framework written in the most performant language out there with the most hardware support should've been a priority. ;)

ridiculous_fish 3y ago

Objective-C++ is underrated.

gyrovorbis 3y ago
It really is a beautiful language, and some of the most powerful aspects of Swift are due to its Objective-C roots.

xenadu02 3y ago

Foundation has not been a pure layer on top of CoreFoundation for over a decade. Some class implementations are unified on the ObjC version, not the pure C CoreFoundation version. Objective-C got good enough that all processes on Apple platforms have the objc runtime in their address space whether they want it or not and many pure C or CF-like frameworks are built on ObjC under the covers.

saagarjha 3y ago
I mean it’s there by virtue of the shared cache, but if we’re talking about what actually gets “loaded” I believe it’s still possible to write binaries that don’t bring in libobjc.
mpweiher 3y ago
Objective-C was always "good enough", and in fact the rewrite from an Objective-C Foundation to the C-based CoreFoundation saw a huge regression: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.next.advocacy/c/uOQnC1xE0AQ# https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.next.advocacy/c/uOQnC1x... The objections to Objective-C at Apple were always political, not technical, with a very entrenched "no Objective-C, ever" faction. Took a quarter of a century, but it looks like they finally won.
- gyrovorbis 3y ago
  Wow, thank you for sharing! Dude, clicked your profile links, and wtf? Objective-S looks awesome! I had never even heard of it, but creating a more easy-to-use language ontop of the Obj-C runtime is epic! I actually wrote my own C-based meta type system for giving my core library and applications that use it a language-independent object-oriented C layer for interop. That's actually how I discovered the magic that is Objective-C and how powerful the C runtime actually is... that's why I'm sad to see it slowly disappear, and anything like this that keeps it alive and uses it is really cool to me. :) I just wrote unit tests for making sure the Objective-C runtime is working and doesn't accidentally get broken in the indie SDK, KallistiOS, for the Sega Dreamcast: https://github.com/KallistiOS/KallistiOS/pull/202 https://github.com/KallistiOS/KallistiOS/pull/202, haha.

lloydatkinson 3y ago

Somehow I doubt porting MacOS to old game consoles was Apple's priority when making this decision.

gyrovorbis 3y ago
I'm not porting MacOS. I'm porting just the Foundation layer, and I'm not using Apple's implementation, I'm using GNUStep's. But hey, maybe having a core, foundational framework written in the most performant language out there with the most hardware support should've been a priority. ;)