> On 7 Sep 2016, at 22:11, Jens Alfke <j...@mooseyard.com> wrote: > > >> On Sep 7, 2016, at 10:03 AM, Alastair Houghton >> <alast...@alastairs-place.net> wrote: >> >> All of it can. Objective-C is just C with some syntactic sugar on top. > > There’s a large amount of semantic sugar too, i.e. the runtime libraries. (If > you think the runtime part must be trivial, go read some of Mike Ash’s posts > about the implementation of objc_msgsend. That’s some of the most insanely > optimized code I’ve ever seen.)
Mike’s site is generally a good read for that kind of thing. For those who don’t know: https://mikeash.com/ Incidentally, on the how-fast-is-objc_msgSend(), according to Mike’s latest Mac figures, it costs on average less than two C++ virtual method calls, and indeed less than division. See https://mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2016-04-15-performance-comparisons-of-common-operations-2016-edition.html >> Really. There’s nothing magic going on. (In fact, the original compilers >> were really just preprocessors that churned out C code.) > > You can say this about nearly any compiler, though. Sort of, yes, but in the case of Objective-C I think there was a conscious intention to keep the Objective part separate from the C part. Put another way, you could make Objective versions of most other languages, if you wanted, by making similar syntactic additions to them to the ones made for Objective-C, and that looks to me to be a deliberate design decision. That’s not quite the same as C++ or Go, which were always intended to be complete languages of their own. Anyway, the point I was trying to make (to Andreas) was that he shouldn’t be scared of using Objective-C because it’s going to do all kinds of magic in his program that he doesn’t understand. > But yes, you can use the Obj-C runtime API from C to do pretty much anything > you can do in Obj-C, like calling methods and implementing classes. It’s just > much, much messier, error-prone, and difficult to read compared to writing > the damn code in Obj-C. Absolutely. IMO Andreas really *should* just use Objective-C for the Mac-specific bits of code. > There’s no pride in refusing to switch languages. I abjured C++ a long time > ago, but guess what, my current project is 99% C++ because that language best > meets the performance and portability requirements. Same here, as it happens. C++11/14 is *much* better than the previous iteration, though it’s still lacking in some areas. > Next time maybe I’ll be using Swift, or Rust, or Pony. C is an ancient, > primitive language and it’s not a good career move to refuse to move past it > :) Agreed. I’d love to be using Swift right now, actually, but I have portability concerns it doesn’t address and the language itself is still not stable. Both will resolve themselves. Rust and Pony look interesting also. Kind regards, Alastair. -- http://alastairs-place.net _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
