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Stuck in what way? It would have been easy for Apple to make an "Objective-C without the C", where it's still using message passing and the Foundation libraries
by moltopoco 1y ago
Stuck in what way? It would have been easy for Apple to make an "Objective-C without the C", where it's still using message passing and the Foundation libraries, but without header files, raw pointers, and all the @messy @syntax. Add little goodies like auto-stringification of enums and so on. I think that kind of superficial cleanup would have been enough to modernize the language. They could have spent the rest of all the time that Swift has consumed on better dev tooling.
- zozbot234 1y agoI mean, "Objective C without the C" is just Smalltalk. It exists already. But that doesn't help you if you want any amount of backwards compatibility with the existing ObjC ecosystem. So you're kinda forced to go with the low-level approach.
- moltopoco 1y agoWhat would stop Apple's hypothetical "Objective-C without the C" from talking to existing Objective-C code? After all, Swift can use UIKit just fine. Even mixing C++ and ObjC is reasonably easy. In a sense, MacRuby was trying something similar, but the dependency on a GC doomed it.