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Comment by arctangos | Hacker News Reader

a) This is a remarkably neat idea. b) It probably shouldn't have to exist.

... which just about sums up the Objective-C experience

I fail to see what Objective-C has to do with any of this.

I'm going to join you here in the grey. Objective-C is a disaster of a language on many levels. Portable C++ is the smarter and better choice(and those few cases where it isn't is solely because of intentional and unethical design decisions by apple to lock you into their platform).

Whether or not that is the case, it is completely irrelevant to the topic of the article, unless C++ would help with the "shouldn't have to exist" part. I imagine that a language like Racket which can embed (vector) images directly into source files might help, but C++ has nothing like that, nor do most languages. You could argue that making icon sets for iOS is harder than it has to be, but that would be an IDE and/or tooling problem, not an Objective-C issue specifically.

I know you & the parent have both been down-voted, but it would be great if you could explain some rationale behind why Objective C is such a disaster in your opinion(s)?

When I first started learning it, I absolutely _hated_ it. With a burning passion.

It is probably now my current favourite and most productive language.

I seem to very rarely write buggy/poor/badly structured code and almost never hit compiler errors/hard crashes unless they are something relatively obscure. It's quite common for me to write 1k+ lines of code, hit build and have exactly what I wanted compile & work pretty much first time.

Not OP, and I agree that Objective-C is great. However, it is potentially troubling, from a performance standpoint, that practically everything is allocated on the heap. There's no support in the language for stack-allocated objects, for example. Now that I've used Swift in production, I also really miss generics. Casting to and from containers gets really annoying and unsafe!

"that practically everything is allocated on the heap"

That's kind of the point though. If you want something on the stack, you write plain old C structs or work with primitives. There's plenty of this happening throughout the cocoa frameworks. On the other hand, if you find yourself writing C structures to the heap in objc, you're probably wasting your effort.

> practically everything is allocated on the heap

It has gotten a lot better thanks to tagged pointers: https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2012-07-27-lets-bui...

Objective C is mostly used for UI code, and I think it's a fantastic language for that, with its Ruby-like weak typing and strong metaprogramming capabilities.

I think that's just the natural consequence of knowing a language. I can do the same with a JS and a linter. I don't think that necessarily speaks to the bug-free nature of JS!

If Objective-C was such the disaster of a language you're making it out to be, it wouldn't be part of the billion dollar industry it powers.

Productivity wise (i.e. making something and shipping it), it's a fantastic language.

What on earth are you talking about ?

You do realise that Objective-C was used because iOS is effectively OSX. And OSX is effectively NextStep. Apple is a big company sure but rewriting your entire SDK is never a quick or simple endeavour. So of course when the iPhone came out Objective-C was going to be used.

And for those who aren't keeping track of the timeline, NeXTSTEP predates C++ templates. Large portions of this could have been done with 1989's Objective-C and the graphics capabilities NeXTSTEP had at the time, though this tool does benefit significantly from some newer syntax.

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