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Re: Objective-C standard
From: |
Markus Hitter |
Subject: |
Re: Objective-C standard |
Date: |
Sat, 3 Jun 2006 11:46:06 +0200 |
Am 02.06.2006 um 16:50 schrieb Adrian Robert:
I was recently refreshing my knowledge of C++ and found myself once
again wondering at the tremendous disparity between market
acceptance of one over the other -- even greater than the Wintel
vs. Mac(tel) disparity.
I'd expect most of the people coding C++ on Mac OS X are trying to
port some Wintel or Linux code. This doesn't help Obj-C and bending
Obj-C towards the needs of these people won't help either.
The lack of a standard is surely part of the problem.
As Apple's Foundation and GNUstep base are similar enough to make a
de-facto standard, I don't see a problem here. Neither there are
competing libraries trying to "improve" something.
If you use Objective-C you basically lock yourself in to a
particular compiler (bad) which could theoretically change its
language definition (worse). (Of course Apple's not going to
invalidate old code, but some of the alternatives might.)
As long as this compiler is open source and can be forked as soon as
something is running havoc, I still don't see a problem here. One
could even see this as an advantage: Once your app is building with
the GNUstep/gcc combo, you pretty much solved your porting issues.
Hard to imagine an alternative, similar well performing compiler
could add substantial value to this situation.
now that OpenStep seems basically dead GNUstep becomes something
like Mono, a more or less precarious clone of a proprietary API
that is of use mainly for porting existing codebases.
This seems to be true.
I guess I'm wondering whether there's anything the open source
community can do about these issues,
The purpose of standards is usually to avoid competitors drifting too
far apart from each other. Since the current Obj-C situation is
filled with more agreement than competition, I fail to see an urgent
demand for a standard. And no, I wouldn't ask GNUstep to change
things just to be different.
For how I could see Obj-C's (and above) market acceptance improved,
see my answer to YL's post.
Markus
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Dipl. Ing. Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/