I was recently refreshing my knowledge of C++ and found myself once
again wondering at the tremendous disparity between market acceptance
of one over the other -- even greater than the Wintel vs. Mac(tel)
disparity. The lack of a standard is surely part of the problem. If
you use Objective-C you basically lock yourself in to a particular
compiler (bad) which could theoretically change its language
definition (worse). (Of course Apple's not going to invalidate old
code, but some of the alternatives might.)
The lack of a standard library is another part of the problem, which
the OpenStep specification and obviously GNUstep solve, but now that
OpenStep seems basically dead GNUstep becomes something like Mono, a
more or less precarious clone of a proprietary API that is of use
mainly for porting existing codebases.
I know Apple hosts an "ObjC language" list that might be more
appropriate for (part of) this topic, but I'd be more curious to hear
the perspective of (assumedly less Apple-orbiting) GNUsteppers. And
I guess I'm wondering whether there's anything the open source
community can do about these issues, since Apple seems not to be
motivated, and Sun, who helped bring OpenStep about in the first
place and aren't always as dumb as they look ;), seems to be
caffeinated, dripped, and filtered out of the picture. Though I
guess an updated OpenStep standard without Apple following it would
be useless.. ;(
Thanks for your thoughts.
Adrian
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