John Reimer wrote:
Hello Chris,
http://www.fsdev.net/~cmiller/a/20090123_dvobjc.html
Also, I do honor the right of reply. If there's something I have
written that is now incorrect or inaccurate I will of course change my
page to reflect that. Heck, all the comparisons in the world are
worthless if they aren't accurate!
Have a great day, and keep up the good work! I personally can't wait
until D gets to the point that a (total bonehead) like me can install
it on OS X! Alas, right now it seemeth to require more brain cells
than I have at my disposal.
Here's a couple comments:
(1) I'm surprised that, in your Objective C introduction, you don't
indicate that the langauge is a direct decendant of Smalltalk.
Interestingly you mention Smalltalk in the D introduction instead, even
though the only similarity between the two is that they both implement a
form of OO programming. Objective C is practically C with embedded
Smalltalk. A major purpose for the creation of Objective C was to bring
the benefits and explicit OO style of SmallTalk to C language developers.
To me it seems that every language borrows from SmallTalk. So I prefer
to just ignore it as the father or all modern language design patterns.
I link to stuff so that people can do more reading if they want. :)
And again, I'm not there to really give a history lesson, more to
analyze the situation of "you want to build an app which does foo, which
is better for that purpose?" (the answer is that it depends: who do you
want to support? Windows and Linux, or OS X?)
(2) The DWT port doesn't support 64-bit platforms (so far as I know),
so I don't understand why this is called a bug. The two ports of SWT
that are currently supported are dwt-win and dwt-linux, both 32-bit
versions and dependent on a 32-compiler (dmd for x86). dwt-mac is still
in development by Jacob Carlborg: this version is compiled with gdc for
Mac and is also 32-bit, so far as I know.
Yes, the 32-bit-ness of DWT has distressed me for some time. When I had
DMD working on Ubuntu a while back I tried to make DWT work... the code
is 64-bit compatible AFACT, but it needs some work with the libraries it
links to - they're not 64-bit compatible. I wasn't up to re-writing the
library linkage (or the prospect of maybe finding that the code itself
isn't 64-bit compatible!) so I just left it unfixed in hopes that
someone else would fix it someday.
Finally, I agree most with what you say here:
"I stand by my original statement that they're different languages and
different tools for different purposes."
My take on it is this:
Some of Objective C's features are very useful (dynamic OO extensions
and runtime binding); however, I think that Objective-C is really meant
to be a sort of domain specific solution for which the Cocoa development
experience is optimized: the language is purposely simple, which makes
it significantly useful for its intended task. I know Apple recently
updated the language to Objective C 2.0 that added a few more
convenience features, but I don't think they even argue that it's
directly competitive with C++ (however, I cannot verify this). In fact,
for those that might need to use other libraries or use more powerful
features only available in C++, there's the option of developing in
Objective C++.
Finally, I don't think Objective-C was intended to be a general-purpose
programming language in the manner of D or C++, so the comparison will
I would argue the opposite. Objective-C retains the ability to compile
and run *any* code that C can. C is a general-purpose language.
Therefore Objective-C is a SmallTalk-ish extension of a general-purpose
language.
To me, it's the lack of really strong multiplatform support that keeps
Objective-C from being more of a multiplatform general-purpose language,
but it's still a general-purpose language to me.
