Future of Cocoa
Future of Cocoa
- Subject: Future of Cocoa
- From: Turtle Creek Software via Cocoa-dev <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2019 11:41:53 -0500
I have been poking around on developer.apple.com, trying to get the big
picture on the future of Cocoa for Mac. Ditto for the future of big apps.
Nothing explicit is said about it, but none of the public-facing pages
mention either Cocoa or Objective-C. It's all SwiftUI and Swift. Searches
still show pages for them, but not the clickable links I followed.
Apple started a bunch of forums in 2015, and they are more active than this
list. Better search tools. Mostly tech q's, but a few interesting
meta-discussions (with similar civility levels as here). I calculated
recent posts per day to get a sense of the mind-share that Apple sees for
their planning: Obj-C is .25 ppd, Cocoa 1.5, Swift 1.8, Cocoa Touch 2.8,
SwiftUI 3.3.
Presumably this list really is running on some forgotten server. Next time
someone trips over a power cord, it may suddenly go dark.
There still is a Carbon 64-bit transition guide in the archives, dated
2007-12-11, last updated 2013-04-23. That suggests 6.5 years
health-to-death for Carbon. Kinda the best guess for Cocoa's future also.
Unlike Carbon, there's not likely to be a firm death point for Cocoa (ARM
chip transition would be convenient but it's too soon). Probably just
deprecation and attrition. The clock may already be ticking- several years
ago there were forum complaints about Obj-C tutorials & pages disappearing,
and Cocoa has disappeared from Apple's PR.
Before I email comments to Apple, it would help to know more about how
other developers use Cocoa. Is it OK to run an informal poll? I'll
consolidate it into a spreadsheet, and won't share any details without
consent. Email me direct if you want more privacy.
How much of each language do you currently use in the apps you ship?
Swift, Obj-C, C++, C, other?
Size of your apps in programmer-years?
How do you feel about moving your code to SwiftUI, 0 = faints in horror, 10
= yippee!? How many months do you think it will take to rewrite?
Thoughts on WinUI vs Cocoa/SwiftUI? Anything else?
Anyone you know at Apple who listens to developers? We worked with at
least a dozen Apple folks in the 90s but they are all gone. The only
familiar names now are Tim Cook and Quinn.
Casey McDermott
TurtleSoft.com
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