Monday, November 27, 2023

Objective-C end of life?? Not a chance...

Recently, I saw this article regarding ObjCs "end of life" from JetBrains.

The tiobe index seems to disagree. It’s also important to remember that jetbrains recently had to take down their AppCode application (which sucked) since it didn’t sell.
Jetbrains is the creator of the kotlin language so they have a vested interest in their android customers. I would take their “index” with a grain of salt to say the least.

While it is certain that Apple won’t be investing into thing beyond ObjC 2.0, it is foolhardy to think that ObjC is going away anytime soon since there is an enormous installed base of stable code, not the least of which is Foundation and AppKit themselves. Also consider CocoaPods.

So, no, not worried about it. Also… look at Java and COBOL. For years people have declared the end of both languages. Java is still popular, though not in vogue and COBOL while not one of the “cool kids” has literally billions of lines of code being maintained and new code being written every year. This (admittedly biased as it is by the CTO of MicroFocus) article gives some reasons why….

Here is the article about COBOL...

Plus… Apple already has a mechanism for automatically allowing objc and swift to work together. Take a look at the frameworks in Xcode and you’ll notice some files called *.apinotes. These are YAML files that are used by the compiler to allow easy integration into swift projects. So, essentially, if Apple writes an ObjC version of a framework they get the swift version for absolutely free (minus the cost of writing the YAML file). If they write a swift only version they don’t get that benefit.

So, yeah, in conclusion… Yes, ObjC is NOT on the rise, but reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated! ;)

PS. That being said, Apple dumping ObjC might spell a boom for us as all of the people who have installed codebases would suddenly need support for it either on macOS (on which we don’t currently work) or on other platforms. Something to think about…

PPS. All of the above being said. I admit I wouldn’t be terribly shocked to hear from Apple that “we have dropped support for the legacy objc language to provide you with the best support for our new swift language to make it the ‘greatest developer experience in the world’” or some grotesque BS like that. Lol

GC

Saturday, March 25, 2023

Swift->ObjC interop

Some interesting notes. I will update this posting as i find more: * https://dart.dev/guides/libraries/objective-c-interop

Compatibility project almost complete

As the much villified theme for star trek enterprise says "its been a long road getting from there to here" i am almost done with all of the work that needed to be done to get us to Catalina compatibility in GNUstep. The reason this is still significant is because Apple hasn't made many changes to either the Foundation or AppKit APIs since then. I have been workinf hard over the last three years. All of the new classes are fully tested. Once this effort is completed I am going to focus on printing, which has always been a problem in GS. And possibly a "reference" distribution.

Thursday, April 02, 2020

Foundation is now close to Catalina compatibility

I have worked hard to get it to this point, but all of the classes in Catalina are now present in GNUstep's base implementation. Soon, all of the classes available in AppKit will also be available in GNUstep's GUI implementation. Please contribute to the project via patreon.... Become a Patron!

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

The results speak for themselves...

For the record, when I say "modern" I do NOT mean the current, old, NeXTSTEP based theme with new widgets. I mean a redesigned one.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Still waiting on you, Apple...

Back in July Apple promised to open source Swift. :)   Well, Apple?  What's going on?  Is this still the plan, Apple?

Saturday, June 13, 2015

Swift 2.0 Going Open Source.... great news!

As announced on their blog and on WWDC, Swift 2.0 will be going open source:

https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=29

GNUstep will fully support bindings to Swift.  We will start on support for this as soon as the source code is released by Apple.  I couldn't be happier about being proven wrong by Apple.  Thank you for restoring my faith in this regard.

Friday, October 03, 2014

The Reasons I Love GNUstep -- Speaking for Free Software

Recently, I had a discussion with RMS about being a speaker for Free Software.   In the end I was told simply to record some of my talks and that I would be given some feedback, but during the discussion I explained why I think GNUstep is important to free software and I believe that this is something that I think is important for other people to understand as well:

Hey Richard,

That shouldn't be hard to do.  I get invited to speak about GNUstep a
lot.  Not just about the technical aspects, but about it's importance
to free software.

While I have your attention, I would like to tell you the following...

I tend to see GNUstep as very important to the free software movement
as it facilitates developers moving away from environments such as
Cocoa and UIKit.  Apple has always been a power for control and an
enemy of freedom which is why I am so passionate about GNUstep.  I
don't like that they have locked down users like they have.

I realize that the rest of the community may not share my view and,
honestly, I have been somewhat disheartened as of late as I have
always had trouble getting other developers to see GNUstep as I do.
They focus on GNOME and KDE and consider Objective-C ugly or not
elegant.  I think that's a shame.   Which brings me to my final point.
  
Apple has recently introduced a new language called Swift.   It has
become abundantly clear that they have no intention of releasing Swift
even as open source (which I understand is a different movement, but
it would, at least, be a step for them in something which resembles
the right direction).

I feel like speaking about free software and, specifically, speaking
about how GNUstep can play an important role in it is why I would like
to be listed on the speakers list.   It would give me more of an
opportunity to speak out about Apple's evils and generally raise
awareness.

Thanks, GC

So, if anyone would like me to come and speak about free software or about GNUstep, please let me know.  I would be grateful for the opportunity.

Objective-C end of life?? Not a chance...

Recently, I saw this article regarding ObjCs "end of life" from JetBrains. The tiobe index seems to disagree. It’s also importa...