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It doesn't. You can access all Objective-C features from C, it's just a bit of a pain. There is a C interface to the Objective-C runtime.

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They're still Objective-C APIs. There's a C interface to the Java runtime as well.

The point is that it shouldn't be a pain to use these interfaces from C, concepts from ObjC/Java/C++ shouldn't leak into them.

That would mean either implementing your entire API twice, or adding layers of pointless indirection, for extremely little gain. It is just not reasonable.

You're assuming that people want to program applications in "platform languages" like Objective-C or Swift or Java or Kotlin. That's generally not true. They want to use their language of choice.

That's why C interfaces are the reasonable choice, you can interface with them conveniently from pretty much any language and if you want a more idiomatic "pointless layer of indirection", you can build it.

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