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For code that's just gluing bits of the API together I agree you're not going to do much better than Objective-C and really that kind of code makes up the bulk
by cageface 15y ago
For code that's just gluing bits of the API together I agree you're not going to do much better than Objective-C and really that kind of code makes up the bulk of most apps.
Obj-C really falls down for more complex algorithms, data structures, and text handling. You can do this kind of thing in Obj-C, of course, but the verbosity really gets in the way. A higher-level language like Ruby would be great for this but maybe the new object literals coming in Obj-C will help close the gap.
- philwelch 15y agoStill don't see it. Algorithms and data structures are going to be the most performance critical parts. It's the glue code if anything that should be written in a scripting language.
- cageface 15y agoSure, but in a lot of today's apps there are no performance critical parts. They're already well under the ceiling of what the hardware can do all the time or they spent 95% of their CPU in optimized routines in the OS/kernel. Of course, a more expressive but faster language like Mirah or Kotlin or Go something would be ideal here. The problem with writing glue code in a scripting language is that it doesn't really buy you much unless you can impose a new, higher-level abstraction on the existing UI. As these examples show, you haven't really improved on Cocoa if all you've done is changed the function calling syntax.