From: Frank Mitchell <frankm@...>
Date: 2003-08-30T14:40:50+09:00
Subject: Objective-C (was Re: Why would you abandon Ruby?)

Martin DeMello wrote:
> 
> MetalOne <jcb@iteris.com> wrote:
> 
> > I am sorry I rambled a bit.  I hoped that helped somebody.  I am just
> > frustrated because I dislike C++ and I can't seem to get away from it.
> 
> Have you looked at Objective C? I keep wanting to learn it, but I'm not
> doing anything speed-critical, and there always seems to be a more
> interesting language I'd rather learn instead.

If you're on Mac OS X, Objective-C is probably great.  I used to work on
NEXTSTEP, and from what I can tell the libraries haven't changed too
dramatically from the OPENSTEP days.

On the other hand, Objective-C on nearly any other platform is almost
pointless (unless perhaps you're using GNUStep).  For nostalgia's sake,
I tried writing a web server in Objective-C.  I gave up after a few
afternoons, after wrangling with a) whether to use the somewhat flaky
GNU runtime or a "Portable Object Compiler" written by a guy who thinks
the original Stepstone compiler from the early 80's is holy writ, and b)
trying to write a Socket class using the UNIX/C APIs because *none* of
the Objective-C libraries on Linux actually had such a thing.  (Caveat:
I've never worked directly with sockets in C before.)

Plus, Objective-C has the same memory management and pointer problems as
C/C++.  You'd have to deal with freeing objects manually, the Boehm
collector, or some sort of refcounting.  (Apple uses a manual
refcounting protocol; the "Portable Object Compiler" has built-in
refcounting, with no "weak reference" mechanism to avoid cycles.)

After poking at it for a while, I realized that there was nothing in
Objective-C I couldn't do better/faster in Ruby.

-- 
Frank Mitchell (frankm each bayarea period net)

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