{"id":9865,"date":"2014-10-14T16:58:18","date_gmt":"2014-10-14T20:58:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=9865"},"modified":"2014-10-14T17:02:14","modified_gmt":"2014-10-14T21:02:14","slug":"hypothetical-objective-c-3-0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2014\/10\/14\/hypothetical-objective-c-3-0\/","title":{"rendered":"Hypothetical Objective-C 3.0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christoffer Lernö<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Many had expected Swift to be more an Objective-C 3.0 than it turned out to be. But what could we have expected such a hypothetical language to look like?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Christoffer Lernö<\/a> (comments<\/a>):<\/p>\n

This list is actually just a sample to get the ideas flowing, and to illustrate how some of the hurdles with ObjC 2.0 can be overcome by a successor that breaks syntax with the past, but still retains full backward compatibility.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

David Owens<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I think the biggest disservice we can do to the Cocoa developer community is remove the underpinnings of the ObjC runtime. It is the language’s, and I truly believe, the platforms’ greatest strength.<\/p>\n

I believe if we hide the complexities of C from our source code and focus on letting the power of the ObjC runtime shine through in our code, we can create a new language that provides of the great flexibility of the ObjC runtime while still accomplishing many of the goals that Swift is attempting to solve - namely safer code by default.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Consider how much progress could have been made with Objective-C had the resources from the Swift project been applied to it instead. Swift is an immensely complicated language that still needs a long time to mature. Objective-C is a much smaller language with a solid core and seemingly a lot of low-hanging fruit (syntax improvements, increased safety).<\/p>\n

For example, a better blocks syntax and support for Python-style comprehensions in Objective-C would do a lot for me today, making my code more concise and readable. Swift’s generics feature was likely more difficult to implement, and it arguably makes the code less readable and for dubious benefits.<\/p>\n

Additionally, an improved Objective-C could in many cases compile down to binaries that work smoothly with existing code and older OS versions. It could still use the same runtime. With Swift, Apple is instead dropping<\/a> some of the benefits of the Objective-C runtime and creating migration issues because some Swift elements don’t interoperate with Objective-C, and others bridge but with performance penalties. We’ve only seen the tip of the interoperability iceberg because so far all of Apple’s APIs are native Objective-C.<\/p>\n

Apple seems to be betting that the benefits for making a whole new language will be worth the migration costs and the stagnation of the language that most of us are actually using. I’m not convinced because most of my favorite Swift features seem like they could have fit into an Objective-C 3.0.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christoffer Lernö: Many had expected Swift to be more an Objective-C 3.0 than it turned out to be. But what could we have expected such a hypothetical language to look like? Christoffer Lernö (comments): This list is actually just a sample to get the ideas flowing, and to illustrate how some of the hurdles with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[46,54,71,901],"class_list":["post-9865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming-category","tag-languagedesign","tag-objective-c","tag-programming","tag-swift-programming-language"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9865"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9867,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9865\/revisions\/9867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}