Why is Cocoa source code hidden? Many of the frustrations we had with the 64-bit update attempt were caused by Cocoa's lack of visible source. It was a "black box" that often required trial-and-error to figure out. Yeah, the headers are visible, and Apple has info online. But sometimes that was not sufficient to understand the actual implementation details.
When debugging, the stack trace inside Cocoa was just a bunch of rarely-helpful Assembly. No way to set breakpoints inside Cocoa classes, or step through their C code. More mysteries and headaches. I personally learned C++ while using the PowerPlant library from Metrowerks. Its source files were totally exposed. Seeing comments and code really helped. When designing or debugging, it was possible to step through their code and see exactly how it functioned. Cocoa would be so much easier to use if its source was accessible like that. In fact, why isn't Cocoa open source? Apple open-sources Swift and the Darwin kernel. Surely the GUI can't be any riskier to expose to developers? Our programmers found several PowerPlant bugs over the years. We fixed them right away in our copy, and reported them so they were fixed in the next update. Apple could get the same benefit for Cocoa. Seems like a win-win. Someone suggested that I send comments to Tim Cook or whomever at Apple. That seems a good idea, but I'd like to see discussion results, first. Assemble more viewpoints. Casey McDermott TurtleSoft.com _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
