Objective C?

[Corwin Light-Williams]

On Thu, 6 Apr 2000, Stan Shebs wrote:

> > There is no visible active development on the language itself nor on the
> > runtime - neither by GNU people nor by Apple, as far as I know.
> 
> There is development on the runtime at Apple, since it's part of
> the OS X system.  The runtime is different from the one used by
> GNU though.  The language proper hasn't been changing, which IMHO is
> just as well (remember the C++-du-jour of prestandardization days?)

I absolutely agree. I was more curious than anything else. I think that
the system could be cleaner, but as for wholesale changes, I'm not
anxious for that either.

On the other hand, I think it would be cool if ObjC was more reflective.
I mean, it's in the same realm as smalltalk or java, but there are some
things missing that I'd kind of like to see. Easy method lookup, for
instance. I'd like to say [[self class] methods] and get a method
dictionary, or whatever was appropriate. It seems like this sort of
thing would be possible(although perhaps difficult) without clobbering
the language as it stands. Then again, I probably have no idea what
I'm talking about

> > Apple is going to check in their changes to gcc and use gcc afterwards
> > (until now Apple used to have their own, patched gcc compiler).
> > Therefore any changes committed into gcc are likely to be implicitly
> > used by Apple as well.
> 
> Yes.  In fact the copyright assignment was sent to the FSF just today.

Cool. Very cool. Does this count everything that Apple's done with it?

> > One of the most notably differences between GNU and NeXT/Apple gcc is,
> > that the latter supports ObjC++, which is quite nice for integrating C++
> > and ObjC code. It would be great to have that in the GNU gcc as well.
> 
> ObjC++ is a sticky problem.  The language is not well-defined, and
> its implementation involves a combination of hacks and cloning of the
> C++ frontend.  The ObjC and C++ class hierarchies are actually
> separate, which is, uh, "interesting".  I'd be astonished if our
> poor overworked G++ maintainers wanted to try to support ObjC++ too.

But if someone wanted to champion that effort, it wouldn't be
impossible? Is the Apple ObjC++ stuff counted in the aforementioned
copyright assignment? I'd really like to see that functionality stay.
If it needs to be cleaned up, fine. I'm more than willing to help out,
although I'm probably not the ideal person for the job.

> The darwin-development list at Apple has some discussion of ObjC
> issues, and some of the people on it are extremely knowledgeable
> about the runtime - I've been learning a lot from them.  ObjC is
> going to be important to Apple for a long time, because the standard
> app framework Cocoa depends on it.

I subscribed to that list also, and sent a similar mail.

Thanks for the responses...

Corwin
----
Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and 
then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath.
At night, the ice weasels come.

--Matt Groening