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Comment by b3b0p | Hacker News Reader

Has Objective-C been deprecated? I was under the assumption it's still fully supported. It obviously won't see the same level of updates, but it's also been around for a longer period of time to mature.

I honestly like Objective-C and prefer it, but I have been using Swift mostly for the iOS projects I have done in recent year or 2. Mostly out of curiosity though.

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Obj-C has changed a lot since I first used it. For instance, reference counting was performed manually via retain, release, and auto-release. There was a brief year where the Boehm garbage collector could be used, but then that was deprecated. Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) came a bit later and properties were added. For a few years you could mix manual reference counting and ARC. Early on you would override dealloc, but later that was a no no. And on it goes...

If you write Apple software, you are generally rewriting you apps every year. The API's are deprecated very often, and the languages are in constant flux as well.

Obj-C has not been deprecated. And in fact the only parts of Obj-C itself that have actually been deprecated were during the migration to "Obj-C 2", where a slew of runtime functions (that nobody used) were removed, as well as direct access to the `isa` pointer (I don't actually remember if the `isa` pointer access was removed when Obj-C 2 was introduced or later when we got tagged pointers).

What the parent is likely referring to is APIs from the SDK, which do get deprecated, and then years later (many years later) removed.

> a slew of runtime functions (that nobody used) were removed

Hey, class_poseAs was useful :(

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