First look at Objective C
I just had a quick look at Objective C today.
My initial impression is that it's very nice indeed: a far more competent addition of object-oriented stuff to C than C++. It adds just enough features to do dynamic dispatch, reference counting, and so on, without going into the enormous tarpit of complexity. It seems to give just enough features: OK, you can't do static dispatch, but you rarely really need that.
I should say though that I have not even written Hello World in ObjC, and probably there are drawbacks. In particular the syntax feels a little alien to regular C, but perhaps that's a feature.
I think the only real platform where it's been used is on the NeXT, and now on OS X's Cocoa, interface, which is an evolution of the same thing. It seems like a shame that it's not more widely used -- things like GTK+ that do OO in C idioms might more easily have been done in ObjC. It says something good about NeXT that basically the same programming interface still made sense for Apple to adopt it ten years later for their new system.
posted Sat 5 Jul 2003 in /software/languages/ObjC | link
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