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Brad Cox has died

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Re: Brad Cox has died

#191

Post by pjmlp »

microtherion wrote: post #176
pjmlp wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faire enough, but sure it wasn't C++'s C subset?

In 68K times, the two compilers were quite different, the C++ was CFront at one point, and insanely slow. It would have taken a real masochist to compile C with a C++ compiler. I can't guarantee that nobody at Apple ever did that, but the suffixes were distinct. In that situation, IDEs usually make the distinction automatically, and it's not hard to write Makefiles to invoke the right compiler.

Ok, thanks for the overview.

Re: Brad Cox has died

#192

Post by pjmlp »

neverartful wrote: post #190
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This simple and elegant solution would not have been possible with C++ Actually, it would, but not via any feature of the language . You can use features of the linker to accomplish this (particularly LD_PRELOAD). It's not the same thing, really, but it felt worth mentioning for the record.

In our case, the LD_PRELOAD approach would not have worked because this was on iOS devices where you can't set that variable. However, I do appreciate you mentioning it because it too is a powerful mechanism that enables some creative and non-invasive solutions in some cases.

Here is how to do it in Windows.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/detours/

https://github.com/microsoft/Detours

Re: Brad Cox has died

#193

Post by pjmlp »

bboreham wrote: post #187
pjmlp wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on which circles you move around. https://www.actiprosoftware.com/ https://www.grapecity.com/ https://www.telerik.com/ Just a sample, there are others.

Sure, I just think web became way more popular. Maybe Wordpress plugins are the spiritual successor.

Those companies also sell Web components, as in for all major SPAs and SSR frameworks, the issue is only enterprises care enough to pay for them.

Re: Brad Cox has died

#194

Post by kristianp »

msie wrote: post #7

[me say:"Oh no! This sucks."]; I loved his little book on Objective-C.

> I loved his little book on Objective-C.

Do you mean: "Object-Oriented Programming : An Evolutionary Approach"? Its 320 pages!

Re: Brad Cox has died

#195

Post by dep_b »

srcreigh wrote: post #79

My first programming job used Objective C to make an iOS app. Back in 2013 XCode was pretty fast. My naive youthful self enjoyed using Objective C's Categories and Associated Objects to share some UI code across 2 UIViewControllers. Did I get it to work? yep. Did it make senior programmers a bit nervous? yep. I wrote a blog post about it. Later, I got to use Java for some Android apps, and after that we got Swift. XC…

You weren't naive. Objective-C is so much better suited to do GUI applications than Java. Plus you could dip into the performance of C where it mattered most. Also while Objective-C (when used idiomatically) was slower than Java, it was consistently and reproducibly slow around reference counting while Java itself decided when and where it was time to do a full garbage collection cycle.

And of course only now languages like Rust and Swift are feasible given the fact they do so much compile time checking. But that makes your IDE a lot slower compared to Objective-C.

Re: Brad Cox has died

#196

Post by favorited »

grahamlee wrote: post #127
favorited wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were both privately held companies, so it might never have been disclosed. Part of the acquisition was that NeXT would license Objective-C back to Stepstone for their own products, so it was more than an outright purchase anyway.

Tom Love mentioned it in a talk once (sorry, I’m not in a position to search for the reference right now). They were offered a choice between a fixed fee of some tens of thousands of dollars, or fifty cents per device. They picked the fixed fee, and felt it was the correct choice right up to the 2000s.

Interesting! Do you know what the "per device" was? Was that device with the Objective-C compiler installed? Device that shipped with the Objective-C runtime?

If it was device with the runtime, I imagine we'd have seen a rewritten "modern" runtime a few years earlier than we did.

Re: Brad Cox has died

#197

Post by grahamlee »

favorited wrote: post #196
grahamlee wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tom Love mentioned it in a talk once (sorry, I’m not in a position to search for the reference right now). They were offered a choice between a fixed fee of some tens of thousands of dollars, or fifty cents per device. They picked the fixed fee, and felt it was the correct choice right up to the 2000s.

Interesting! Do you know what the "per device" was? Was that device with the Objective-C compiler installed? Device that shipped with the Objective-C runtime? If it was device with the runtime, I imagine we'd have seen a rewritten "modern" runtime a few years earlier than we did.

I've found the video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adI6-liGXqE, he said something along the lines of "five dollars [not fifty cents] per device running Objective-C", that make me think he meant the runtime.

I don't necessarily agree that the result would have been a rewritten runtime, just because the NeXT runtime (and compiler based on gcc) already was their own code so the licence must have been for "IP" in broader terms. Remembering that Apple were very heavily into Java around the time of the NeXT integration (https://www.sicpers.info/2020/07/so-whats-the-plan-part-1-wh...), I imagine that they would have gone more heavily in Java's direction.

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