On 2010-11-03 20:51:00 -0400, Walter Bright <newshou...@digitalmars.com> said:
Michel Fortin wrote:
You heard that right: someone is considering writing Cocoa programs
because of D!
That's great news!
I think we should try to attract Cocoa programmers (and would-be Cocoa
programmers) by offering them the strengths of D. What are those
strengths? Some are things you probably take for given (overloading),
others are design by contract, generic programming, nested classes,
mixins, integrated unittests and documentation, memory safety, a
race-free threading model, did I miss anything? All those good things
aren't available in Objective-C and thus can't be used with Cocoa. I
want to make those them available to Cocoa programmers. And for this, I
need them to work with the Objective-C object model. By making
Objective-C objects bind to D semantics, all those feature will "just
work" with Cocoa with minimal changes to the frontend (and well written
bindings).
I don't know O-C. I've never written a line of it. So I'm shooting in
the dark about the best way to attach it to D.
I agree with all your goals.
One possibility: simply adopt O-C syntax.
That indeed could work. There's effectively a case to be made that we
could integrate Objective-C in D the same way it is integrated with C++
with Objective-C++ (two distinct syntaxes for two distinct object
models). Existing Objective-C programmers will probably be more
familiar with code written this way so there's no doubt some people
would prefer that.
But there's also a lot of Cocoa programmers that would prefer a more
"conventional" syntax and D could be very appealing to them. I'm not
one of those as I'm quite fond of the long and expressive method names
in Objective-C, but I still think it's a bad fit for D because it gets
in the way of bringing those interesting D features to Cocoa.
--
Michel Fortin
michel.for...@michelf.com
http://michelf.com/
