Apple's new Objective-C to Javascript Bridge

Post by phawk » Wed, May 15, 2013, 6:53 PM UTC

jfb wrote: post #26

kybernetyk wrote: post #23

> The most interesting possiblility would be that this is the start of Apple’s evolution away from Objective-C into promoting a higher-level language for their platform The thing is: Why would they want to transform away? As it is now Obj-C is pretty sane. The memory management is now a non-brainer so that even people who come from managed languages can grasp it. GCD is great for concurrency. And using C and C++ base…

Maybe I've just swallowed the Kool-Aid, but I don't see the putative benefits of Apple's switching platforms. I'm also not clear on how many people there are who a) can write non-trivial software and b) can't learn a C derivative language who c) would actually write software for Apple's platforms. It just seems like a pretty small set. And, if Apple were to switch, why would they pick a language as shitty as Javascri…

Post by jfb » Wed, May 15, 2013, 6:55 PM UTC

phawk wrote: post #41

jfb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I've just swallowed the Kool-Aid, but I don't see the putative benefits of Apple's switching platforms. I'm also not clear on how many people there are who a) can write non-trivial software and b) can't learn a C derivative language who c) would actually write software for Apple's platforms. It just seems like a pretty small set. And, if Apple were to switch, why would they pick a language as shitty as Javascri…

I think it's less a specific shift to JS, but more a shift to HTML5 and CSS3. That would probably be a better reason to allow people to write JS apps.

Post by udp » Wed, May 15, 2013, 7:00 PM UTC

gsnedders wrote: post #16

apike wrote: post #2

My guess is that this would be fast enough to build almost any Mac app and many iOS apps. The bigger question for me is, how gross would it be to deal with the "Objective-C-ness" of the Cocoa APIs through JavaScript?

On iOS it won't be that quick: you don't get anything more than the JS interpreter, as you cannot allocate any executable memory on iOS, so any JITing compiler is out of the question.

Post by stcredzero » Wed, May 15, 2013, 7:15 PM UTC

drtse4 wrote: post #35

Arelius wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually like Javascript. Sure it has some warts. But it has an elegance I've really only seen in Javascript, Lua, and Lisp.

You last sentence is a bit far-fetched.

Post by marknutter » Wed, May 15, 2013, 7:18 PM UTC

jfb wrote: post #26

kybernetyk wrote: post #23

> The most interesting possiblility would be that this is the start of Apple’s evolution away from Objective-C into promoting a higher-level language for their platform The thing is: Why would they want to transform away? As it is now Obj-C is pretty sane. The memory management is now a non-brainer so that even people who come from managed languages can grasp it. GCD is great for concurrency. And using C and C++ base…

Maybe I've just swallowed the Kool-Aid, but I don't see the putative benefits of Apple's switching platforms. I'm also not clear on how many people there are who a) can write non-trivial software and b) can't learn a C derivative language who c) would actually write software for Apple's platforms. It just seems like a pretty small set. And, if Apple were to switch, why would they pick a language as shitty as Javascri…