Re: Thoughts on Cocoa
Re: Thoughts on Cocoa
- Subject: Re: Thoughts on Cocoa
- From: John McCall via Cocoa-dev <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 02 Oct 2019 15:19:43 -0400
On 2 Oct 2019, at 15:03, Jeff Evans via Cocoa-dev wrote:
Here’s another small developer’s perspective:
Practica Musica has been around since 1987 in one form or another
(originally in 68000 assembler!). We’ve sold a lot of Macs for
Apple. The upcoming version 7 is still C++ with Objective-C where
necessary for the UI. We refuse to use Swift, another
platform-specific language: the project is very large and we can’t
rewrite hundreds of files on a whim. Swift may be nice, but it’s
not necessary.
I haven’t been paying close attention and can’t tell if the
concern in this discussion is over any hints that Apple might again
force a major change on existing apps, but if there have been such
hints let me add another voice to the chorus: Apple really needs to
keep its installed base.
The new Windows version of Practica Musica is 100% plain old C++,
using Microsoft’s new C++/winrt, so mostly only the UI classes
differ from the Mac version. That is a clean, easy, fast system and I
can trust them not to abandon it any time soon. Using their new system
was entirely voluntary; the old ways are still viable but the new one
is just better.
I hope Apple can borrow that attitude from MS. I worry about Apple
pulling the rug out from under our Mac projects somewhere down the
line. If they do we’ll have to abandon the platform, with great
regrets. Switching to Intel chips was unavoidable; we understood that;
but if, for example, they deprecate the existing Obj-C UI they’ll
leave a lot of installed base behind.
Don’t worry, ObjC UI is not being deprecated. There are new APIs in
Catalina that are Swift-only, but that does not and will not prevent you
from continuing to write ObjC applications that simply don’t use those
APIs. Apple is well aware that ObjC is a core language for most of our
developer community, and that even developers who are primarily writing
new code in Swift are usually integrating that into substantial bodies
of existing ObjC code.
Catalina does drop support for 32-bit applications. Since Carbon has
never been supported on 64-bit macOS, this means that Carbon is no
longer supported, after 7 years of formal deprecation and a few more
years of “writing on the wall”. That is what some people are upset
about.
John.
Jeff Evans
On Oct 2, 2019, at 10:43 AM, Richard Charles via Cocoa-dev
<email@hidden> wrote:
On Oct 2, 2019, at 11:14 AM, Turtle Creek Software via Cocoa-dev
<email@hidden> wrote:
Sadly, we just decided to abandon the Cocoa update for our app.
Great historical overview from a small developers perspective. Perhaps
you should send this email to Tim Cook. It might some attention. Just
a thought.
--Richard Charles
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