Objective-C standard

[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.  The lack of a standard is surely part of the problem.  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.)

The lack of a standard library is another part of the problem, which  
the OpenStep specification and obviously GNUstep solve, but 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.

I know Apple hosts an "ObjC language" list that might be more  
appropriate for (part of) this topic, but I'd be more curious to hear  
the perspective of (assumedly less Apple-orbiting) GNUsteppers.  And  
I guess I'm wondering whether there's anything the open source  
community can do about these issues, since Apple seems not to be  
motivated, and Sun, who helped bring OpenStep about in the first  
place and aren't always as dumb as they look ;), seems to be  
caffeinated, dripped, and filtered out of the picture.  Though I  
guess an updated OpenStep standard without Apple following it would  
be useless..  ;(

Thanks for your thoughts.

Adrian