I have been poking around on developer.apple.com, trying to get the big picture on the future of Cocoa for Mac. Ditto for the future of big apps.
Nothing explicit is said about it, but none of the public-facing pages mention either Cocoa or Objective-C. It's all SwiftUI and Swift. Searches still show pages for them, but not the clickable links I followed. Apple started a bunch of forums in 2015, and they are more active than this list. Better search tools. Mostly tech q's, but a few interesting meta-discussions (with similar civility levels as here). I calculated recent posts per day to get a sense of the mind-share that Apple sees for their planning: Obj-C is .25 ppd, Cocoa 1.5, Swift 1.8, Cocoa Touch 2.8, SwiftUI 3.3. Presumably this list really is running on some forgotten server. Next time someone trips over a power cord, it may suddenly go dark. There still is a Carbon 64-bit transition guide in the archives, dated 2007-12-11, last updated 2013-04-23. That suggests 6.5 years health-to-death for Carbon. Kinda the best guess for Cocoa's future also. Unlike Carbon, there's not likely to be a firm death point for Cocoa (ARM chip transition would be convenient but it's too soon). Probably just deprecation and attrition. The clock may already be ticking- several years ago there were forum complaints about Obj-C tutorials & pages disappearing, and Cocoa has disappeared from Apple's PR. Before I email comments to Apple, it would help to know more about how other developers use Cocoa. Is it OK to run an informal poll? I'll consolidate it into a spreadsheet, and won't share any details without consent. Email me direct if you want more privacy. How much of each language do you currently use in the apps you ship? Swift, Obj-C, C++, C, other? Size of your apps in programmer-years? How do you feel about moving your code to SwiftUI, 0 = faints in horror, 10 = yippee!? How many months do you think it will take to rewrite? Thoughts on WinUI vs Cocoa/SwiftUI? Anything else? Anyone you know at Apple who listens to developers? We worked with at least a dozen Apple folks in the 90s but they are all gone. The only familiar names now are Tim Cook and Quinn. 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
