Re: Learning Cocoa with RubyCocoa (was Regular Expressions)
Re: Learning Cocoa with RubyCocoa (was Regular Expressions)
- Subject: Re: Learning Cocoa with RubyCocoa (was Regular Expressions)
- From: Philippe Mougin <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2008 00:50:48 +0200
Le 7 juin 08 à 22:26, WT a écrit :
I still don't see any good-enough *technical* reason to justify
basing Cocoa on an extension of C, however. That's all I've been
trying to say.
WT, I think this is an interesting question (as are your other
comments), and I think I have the answer :-)
The thing is that Mac OS X is a UNIX system and C is the native
language on UNIX (in part because UNIX is itself implemented in C).
Therefore, C based languages (i.e., C, ObjC and C++) have a very
synergistic relationship with the OS, at the technical level.
There have been several serious initiatives to provide new
environments based on other languages (from ADA back in the early
eighties to Java more recently) , but so far none has been able to
displace C-based languages for application development on UNIX based
systems, except in the field of in-house enterprise applications or in
very specific niches.
For instance, look at the "SUN Java Desktop System", which
constitutes user-facing layers of Solaris 10, including a complete
application suite. Despite its name, it is nearly entirely developed
in C/C++.
For better or worse, it seems that, as a general rule, the language in
which a given OS is implemented is also the most technically apt for
application development on that OS. This might not hold true forever,
of course. But, in the meantime, I think we are certainly very lucky
to be stuck with Objective-C, which is a surprisingly efficient and
powerful combination of C and Smalltalk. You'll see that with the new
automatic garbage collection in Objective-C 2.0, the main development
productivity weakness with regard to languages like Java has been
lifted.
Philippe
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