by mikehall314
5 subcomments
- Every so often I get weirdly obsessed with Objective-J, which "has the same relationship to JavaScript as Objective-C has to C". It is (was?) an absolutely bonkers project. I think it has more or less died since 280 North was acquired.
https://www.cappuccino.dev/learn/objective-j.html
by vintagedave
5 subcomments
- I really miss Objective-C, and in the world of Swift craziness [1] I'm reminded often of this blog post [2] wondering what would have happened if Apple hadn't encountered Second System Syndrome for its recommended language.
(There's a decent argument it encountered it in iOS and macOS too.)
[1] https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo... -- apologies to the authors, but even as a previous C++ guy, my brain twisted at that. Inside Swift is a slim language waiting to get out... and that slim language is just a safer Objective C.
[2] https://medium.com/goodones/pareto-optimal-apple-devtools-b4...
by seanalltogether
5 subcomments
- At this point in my career, I can't go back to a language that doesn't have support for Optionals or compiler validation of nullable types. I can sacrifice async or fancy stream apis, but I will never go back to chasing null pointer exceptions on a daily basis.
- Wow, I haven't written any Objective-C since around 2012. I just went back and looked at some code I had written back then and that really brought back some memories. I was much happier then. I'm perpetually sad and unemployed now.
That's all. Enjoy yourselves.
by flohofwoe
4 subcomments
- IMHO the one great feature of Objective-C (compared to C++) is that it doesn't interfere with any C language features. In C++ the C 'subset' is stuck in the mid-1990s, while Objective-C "just works" with any recent C standard.
- Good time to check out ObjFW [1], it's a cross platform ObjC framework that's just really awesome
[1] https://git.nil.im/ObjFW/ObjFW
- Smalltalk is like pizza. Even when it's bad, it's still pretty good.
by waynecochran
4 subcomments
- I still find Objective-C++ useful for writing MacOS apps that make heavy use of C++ libraries (e.g.; Eigen, OpenCV). The caveat is I have done a lot of Objective-C programming and Swift is still not as seamless as I would like bridging with modern C++ and the the STL.
by danielvaughn
0 subcomment
- I really enjoyed Obj-C when I did some iOS work back in 2015/2016. It was my first non-JS language, and it taught me so much that I didn't understand since I started out doing web dev.
- One of the things I miss about Objective C is just how easy it is to call into a C API, or otherwise include a C function if that's the easiest way to call into a C API.
I shipped a cross-platform C# project, and once I realized I could expose "ordinary C" from the Objective C part, it was very easy to integrate the two without using a framework. (It helped that the UI was 100% Objective C, so there wasn't much surface area between the C# and Objective C parts. We initially used MonobjC, but first I had to work around a shortcoming, and then we needed to remove MonobjC due to licensing and some of the newer C# integration layers were not available.)
by mghackerlady
0 subcomment
- I've always liked Objective-C. Despite me not really liking object-oriented programming, I appreciate that its one of a handful of languages to do actual smalltalk-esque oop
- I still love Objective-C and you can pry it from my cold dead hands - tho I basically just call in to it from Rust these days for convenience reasons (cargo).
That aside, I was glancing through the source code for the engine and noticed this:
https://codeberg.org/brentsimmons/SalmonBay/src/branch/main/...
I wonder why they opted to do this instead of NSJSONSerialization - maybe I'm just misunderstanding the use for the class tho.
by LoganDark
5 subcomments
- I recently started writing for macOS in Swift and, holy hell, the debuggability of the windowing toolkits is actually unparalleled. I've never seen something that is this introspectable at runtime, easy to decompile and analyze, intercept and modify, etc. Everything is so modular, with subclassing and delegation patterns everywhere. It seems all because of the Objective-C runtime, as without it you'd end up needing something similar anyway.
You can reach into built-in components and precisely modify just what you want while keeping everything else platform-native and without having to reimplement everything. I've never seen anything like this before, anywhere. Maybe OLE on Windows wanted to be this (I've seen similar capabilities in REALLY OLD software written around OLE!) but the entirety of Windows' interface and shell and user experience was never unified on OLE so its use was always limited to something akin to a plugin layer. (In WordPad, for example)
The only thing that even seems reminiscent is maybe Android Studio, and maybe some "cross-platform" toolkits that are comparatively incredibly immature in other areas. But Android Studio is so largely intolerable that I was never able to dig very far into its debugging capabilities.
I feel like I must be in some sort of honeymoon phase but I 100% completely understand now why many Mac-native apps are Mac-native. I tried to write a WinUI3 app a year or two ago and it was a terrible experience. I tried to get into Android app development some years ago and it was a terrible experience. Writing GUIs for the Linux desktop is also a terrible experience. But macOS? I feel like I want to sleep with it, and I weep for what they've done with liquid glass. I want the perfection that led to Cocoa and all its abstractions. Reading all the really, super old documentation that explains entire subsystems in amazingly technical depth makes me want to SCREAM at how undocumented, unpolished and buggy some of the newer features have gotten.
I've never seen documentation anything like that before, except for Linux, on Raymond Chen's blog, and some reverse-engineering writeups. I do love Linux but its userspace ecosystem just is not for me.
Maybe this is also why Smalltalk fiends are such fans. I should really get into that sometime. Maybe Lisp too.
by Naman-Dixit
0 subcomment
- > you’ll realize how small a language it is, how easy to hold in your palm and turn around and understand all sides of it
I have never programmed in ObjC but was curious to learn how it works, and so I decided to write a ObjC runtime [0]. It took less than 2000 lines, and a large number of them are comments. Now I wonder how easy would it be to do dome lispy symbolic computing in it. Maybe something like a Prolog.
[0] https://gist.github.com/namandixit/76cd084676acdf16cfd014cbb...
- I do not get this argument at all. A long time ago I ported a simple sudoku solver to Objective-C by using the foundation classes, like NSMutableArray. It was terribly slow. All those messaging sending just to do what should have been a single instruction (or less!) That’s when I realized that if you want speed in an Objective-C app, you really are going to reach for the C subset. The objective part is really good for building GUIs, but not for pure computation.
- > [[those squareBrackets] lookInsane:YES].
Nah, they are perfectly sane. They look like little ASCII envelopes because that's exactly the metaphor. Square brackets send messages.
- Any popular cross-platform GUI toolkits? How do you find GNUstep?
- The most difficult part of Objective-C is its ARC rules, and mixing ARC and non-ARC code in the same project.
by netbioserror
1 subcomments
- I bounced off of Objective-C not because of its message-passing OO. That was the actual cool part. I bounced off because of the insane amount of boilerplate prototyping and headers required to use it.
I think every OO language should be using Smalltalk's message-passing style rather than holding hard references, and Objective-C is a great model. But discard the rest.
by monster_truck
3 subcomments
- Someone should vibe code Objective-C 3.0
by carpe__diem
0 subcomment
- libobjc is simply great. Old school, but great.
- That's it, I'm pivoting my startup technically and rewriting everything in ObjC! /s
- [dead]
- [objC retain]
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