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Richard Cook

How VSTO will change your life (for the better, that is)
Languages: Objective-C this time

I switched on my Mac for the first time in about three months this evening. I had a hankering to do some Objective-C. This is a language I've tried to master before but without huge amounts of success. However, with my renewed interest in late binding and dynamic languages, I think it's time to start looking again. And this time it's absolutely going to happen. Before I switched on the Mac I tried the Portable Object Compiler and MinGW port of GCC on my Windows box but couldn't get either of them to compile my sources without the compiler crashing due to segmentation faults (caused by exception handling, I believe). Not cool. Anyway, I'm back in Mac land and having fun.

Posted: Wednesday, November 19, 2008 9:31 AM by rcook

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Languages: Objective-C this time | MS Tech News said:

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# November 19, 2008 6:58 AM

int19h said:

To be honest, I don't quite understand what's all the fuss about ObjC is. It really is a very weird combo of a very low-level language with a high-level object model and implementation. On one hand, message passing as opposed to vtables. On another, no GC and exceptions. Yeah, I know they're in now, but it sure did take a long time to get them there; and there are still no namespaces. A completely disconnected type system, where C types are in their own little statically and strongly typed universe, and ObjC types are in their dynamic world, and not only the boxing is manual, but the infrastructure (i.e. the box types themselves) have to be manually written for every new struct.

Syntax is also weird. I actually love the simplicity of Smalltalk syntax and the clarity of its spelled-out method calls, but the whole point of it is to use it from ground up. When you have the ugliness of C at the base, and no way to escape it, throwing Smalltalk into the mix just makes it looks all the more ugly because the styles are so different.

I really wish there was a good modern cross-platform Smalltalk implementation...

# November 19, 2008 2:27 PM
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