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Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga

heap.zone

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Re: Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga

#91

Post by apple4ever »

iainmerrick wrote: post #49
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.

Me too. I absolutely love Objective-C and its syntax. Admittedly it takes some time to get use to and understand, but once you do, its beautiful.

Re: Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga

#93

Post by apple4ever »

aplummer wrote: post #11
_diyu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually prefer Objective-C to Swift.

What got me over the line was optionals and protocols + generics, the safety and expressiveness combined will eventually (hopefully!) win you over!

That in fact is all the things I don't like about Swift. I actually fine its way less expressive than Objective-C.

Re: Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga

#95

Post by apple4ever »

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…

WONDERFUL RANT.

It really sums up the current debate as well.

I can't stand Swift. I think what I hate is the hate towards Objective-C.

Re: Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga

#97

Post by aplummer »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #73
aplummer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also I agree you can tell safety was the number one priority. However the positive is basically never getting runtime errors, except when interfacing with IB or obj-c even when people are programming in a hurry, which is nice for me.

"Never getting runtime errors" is as far fetched as it can be. Consider Xcode suggesting developers use force unwrap ("!"), that leads to many more crashes with unexperienced developers than the ObjC message to nil paradigm. Subjectively, I have seen much more crashes in third-party software written in Swift than in ObjC (usually unwrapping or casting incorrectly), including in Apple's software. I cannot say if this…

I didn’t know it suggested force unwrapping, I always have a linter to prevent it except for IBOutlets etc.

Re: Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga

#98

Post by Midar »

apple4ever wrote: post #96

Very cool! I ported ObjFW to the Omega2 (still have some things to clean up before releasing it to the public).

Hm, Omega2 seems to run OpenWrt, if I see it right? In that case, it should even just work.

Alternatively, if you want to avoid OpenWrt, there's also ObjFW on bare-metal ARM: https://heap.zone/blog/?68

Re: Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga

#99

Post by Midar »

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…

That all sounds too familiar. When I was still a little kid going to school, I was using Linux and found Objective-C. Really liked the language and concepts, but lacking a framework for Objective-C on Linux. So I started ObjFW a few years later. Seems you had the same experience before I was even born, except on Amiga :).

Re: Bringing Objective-C to the Amiga

#100

Post by saagarjha »

mpweiher wrote: post #79
iainmerrick wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's really troubling about these things (GC, ARC, Swift) is the rabid fanboyism. When GC came out, you were complete idiot and a luddite if you didn't embrace it I don’t know how to check this, but that isn’t how I remember it at all. There was a brief flurry of interest when Apple added GC, but it never caught on. If it had been popular, Apple would have kept it. Then when ARC arrived, it was genuinely popular, a…

> [GC not catching on] Well, GC was much harder to adopt, as it wasn't incremental. Either your code was GC or not. All of it. > If it had been popular, Apple would have kept it. Weeelll...I think the bigger problem with GC was that it didn't work; they never could get all the bugs out. Including the performance issues, but more significantly potentially huge leaks. Well, technically that's also performance. I also v…

> Apple's Swift book gives a few conditions where you might consider structs and then says you should use classes for everything else

This is an unfortunate edict that the core team is trying to get amended.

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