Re: Objective-C standard

[Markus Hitter]

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/