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Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga

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Re: Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga

#41

Post by LeoNatan25 »

saagarjha wrote: post #30
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are actually temporary problems. Once ABI stability is implemented, those DLLs will not be needed. The compiler is obviously a WIP and will take years to become more mature and optimized. Likewise for C++ interop. There are fundamental issues with Swift, but those are not them.

I'm much more hopeful for ABI stability than C++ interoperatability. I think will take a long time before we'll be able to seamlessly work with C++ code as we do currently with say Objective-C or C.

Weren’t some steps taken to start working on preliminary support, or at least building blocks? I might be mistaken.

Re: Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga

#42

Post by mpweiher »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #22
tzahola wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, but you lose C++ interop, your binary will be inflated with those Swift proxy libs and your compilation times will increase 2-3-fold.

Those are actually temporary problems. Once ABI stability is implemented, those DLLs will not be needed. The compiler is obviously a WIP and will take years to become more mature and optimized. Likewise for C++ interop. There are fundamental issues with Swift, but those are not them.

Compile times are not a temporary problem, they are fundamental. Yes, they can fix some of the more egregious specific problems, but the model they have chosen is inherently expensive to compile as it leans so much on the compiler.

And they no longer have Mr. Moore to bail them out by mere passage of time.

In fact, last I checked the compiler has actually gotten slower, overall, in recent versions.

Re: Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga

#43

Post by rimliu »

jmpt wrote: post #35
blackrock wrote: post #3

Does anyone else look at Objective-C code, and just want to puke?

No, and if you do, then I suggest you visit a doctor. Rant: Objective-C is a wonderful language, once you learn it properly. There's a lot of Swift fanboiism (is that a word?) and a lot of Objective-C hate. I have an opinion on why. The vast majority of people that used Objective-C were drawn to the success of iOS. They were developers, used to languages like Javascript, Java or C++. Coming to Objective-C, their imme…

Not sure if you are that bad at Swift of that good at trolling.

Re: Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga

#44

Post by rimliu »

checker659 wrote: post #39
jmpt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, and if you do, then I suggest you visit a doctor. Rant: Objective-C is a wonderful language, once you learn it properly. There's a lot of Swift fanboiism (is that a word?) and a lot of Objective-C hate. I have an opinion on why. The vast majority of people that used Objective-C were drawn to the success of iOS. They were developers, used to languages like Javascript, Java or C++. Coming to Objective-C, their imme…

I still use manual reference counting :) In John Oliver’s voice : “Fuck you Apple, fuck you.”

This kind of bragging sound just like "I don't read books".

Re: Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga

#47

Post by alxlaz »

mpweiher wrote: post #37

Funky! I "brought" Objective-C to the Amiga sometime in ~1986/1987. I had recently acquired one of the first Amigas in Germany, still a US NTSC model, and also seen Objective-C discussed in a BYTE article. The beautiful OO structure of the Amiga Exec kernel and the higher OS levels built on top of those abstractions (except the abomination that was AmigaDOS) was almost certainly an inspiration. Having also recently p…

Hey, I remember M:OOP!

Many, many years later (~2003 I think, I was barely in high school) my dad brought me a small book, edited by one of the local universities, which was essentially a student's guide to the diploma exam (sort of like a BSc thesis + a written exam, for our American friends -- this system used to be a lot more popular in Europe back then).

It included various study guides, example questions and -- my favourite -- a bunch of recommended subjects for the diploma thesis. "Projects" as in practical things you would study and implement, proposed by every department in the university. I think there were hundreds of them.

One of the was an Objective-C runtime implementation for Linux systems (I got the book in ~2003 but it was older, from around 1996 or 1998, I think, when GNUStep was just becoming a thing). I had read an article about Objective-C and spent a load of cash at the local internet cafe trying to figure out how I could do that.

I lost interest quickly enough when I realized one is already available and it turned out that writing stuff with GNUStep was a lot more fun than figuring out how it worked.

But I did stumble upon a couple of articles about M:OOP. Unfortunately, I don't speak German at all, but a very kind IRC user (whose name I've long forgotten, sadly) basically translated them for me. I found the whole thing absolutely amazing; I was already interested in low-level programming at the time, and this made me even more interested.

Re: Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga

#48

Post by jmpt »

rimliu wrote: post #43
jmpt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, and if you do, then I suggest you visit a doctor. Rant: Objective-C is a wonderful language, once you learn it properly. There's a lot of Swift fanboiism (is that a word?) and a lot of Objective-C hate. I have an opinion on why. The vast majority of people that used Objective-C were drawn to the success of iOS. They were developers, used to languages like Javascript, Java or C++. Coming to Objective-C, their imme…

Not sure if you are that bad at Swift of that good at trolling.

I find it troubling that you equate somebody not being in love with Swift with trolling. Also, you are questioning my skill in Swift because you disagree with me. That makes perfect sense.

Instead of an ad hominem, you could actually, you know, argue against my points.

You didn't reply to the parent, who stated that Objective-C is puke inducing... I am the one who is a troll. OK :)

I remind you that the OP is about Objective-C being ported to Amiga. Somehow, it attracted people who LIKE Objective-C. The insanity of it all!

Enjoy your day!

Re: Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga

#49

Post by iainmerrick »

blackrock wrote: post #3

Does anyone else look at Objective-C code, and just want to puke?

Not me. Objective-C is lovely.

For me the addition of Automated Reference Counting was key. That took a while bunch of tedious but essential boilerplate out of the language. Before ARC, Obj-C was a weird but interesting language that I didn’t want to use. With ARC it all came together into a nice expressive high-level language with raw C power available when you need it.

Re: Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga

#50

Post by iainmerrick »

saagarjha wrote: post #28
Apocryphon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I prefer the brackets of ObjC to the colon overload of C++

> the colon overload of C++ There's a lot of colons here too: - (id)outputImageProviderFromBufferWithPixelFormat:(NSString *)format pixelsWide:(NSUInteger)width pixelsHigh:(NSUInteger)height baseAddress:(const void *)baseAddress bytesPerRow:(NSUInteger)rowBytes releaseCallback:(QCPlugInBufferReleaseCallback)callback releaseContext:(void *)context colorSpace:(CGColorSpaceRef)colorSpace shouldColorMatch:(BOOL)colorMatc…

In other languages, a function with that many parameters would be close to unusable. Far too easy to get them mixed up. The way Obj-C forces you to name each argument is great.
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