I wonder how likely it'll be they keep Objective-C support. Ultimately, there's a huge amount of useful legacy code available they would be throwing away.
I think the way it's set up right now with interoperability works pretty well, and using it for new apps is a great idea, but forcing people to throw away existing apps that have been around for years.
Apple hasn't really consistenly stuck by Objective-C; they tried to push people in the Java direction for OS X "Cocoa" development maybe about 10 years ago. Never really caught on, though.
That's what MS said as well, when they were pushing C#. All Windows will be using safe code! Still waiting... Another example is Mozilla and Rust - hell, I wouldn't be surprised if there was still Netscape code somewhere in the bowels of FF/TB!
Sure, Apple cares less about backward compatibility, but still, it's unlikely Objective-C is going anywhere, under the hood.
Honestly, that seems doubtful. The C language has intense dominance and Objective-C puts a nice, minimal, object oriented wrapper on all of that while all the C developer tools remain effective.
I didn't dispute the potential of Objective-C being better and more useful. What I said, is that although Objective-C may be better it never got more popular than the original.
Therefore although their effort with what they call Objective-J may be worthwhile, it's certain it will never go mainstream.
One significant reason? It runs toooo slow on IE. IF it ever gets fast, maybe more people will give it a shot.
Yeah, the point I was trying to make is just that Apple could easily decide to ditch Objective-C in the relatively near future.
From our point of view as developers, there are good reasons not to, like maintaining backwards compatibility and keeping developers happy, but Apple generally seems to ignore those issues. Not that they actually want developers to be unhappy, they just expect and require them to fall in line.
(Or they could ditch Swift too and go with something entirely new and crazy, but that seems too unlikely even for me)
Edit to clarify: I think what they do care about is technical issues, and giving themselves the tools to make the slick products they want to make. And their technical strategy is generally pretty sound -- look at their balanced CPU+GPU designs on iOS, for example, both faster and more power-efficient than the ludicrous octo-cores and oversized screens you get on "flagship" Android devices.
To me, making Swift and Objective-C interoperable was a smart decision to give themselves (and coincidentally their developers) a smooth migration path. They also think that reference-counting is better than tracing GC for the types of applications they care about (and I think they're correct). But nothing in that says they care about keeping Objective-C around indefinitely.
reply