From: Mark Lucas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Eric, Thanks, one of the best explanations I have read. The only thing that I would add is that Apple has made it very clear that Cocoa is the preferred language for application development on the Mac. All new development occurs there and they are trying to minimize new development on the carbon side. They have announced their intention to make Python and Ruby first class citizens in their development environment.
Thanks for the compliments. So I think it is worthwhile to distinguish Objective-C (the language) from Cocoa (the framework) in this type of discussion. (Java can get confusing because it refers to both the language and frameworks.) So in my Obj-C/Obj-C++ discussion, I tried to avoid the topic of Cocoa completely and everything is about the Obj-C language. But, yes, you are right to bring up that there is an implicit understanding that the reason we're talking about Obj-C is that it is the best way to access Cocoa for our viewer back end which generally provides the best experience for both developers and users of Mac OS X. So certainly, Apple is promoting Cocoa as the preferred application development framework for Mac. But as you point out with Python and Ruby, though Objective-C is the native language of the Cocoa frameworks, they are encouraging Cocoa development irrespective of the language (iff it can match or exceed Obj-C's dynamism). This is similar to what Microsoft is trying to do with C# and the CLR. (An aside, Adobe's new product "Lightroom" is Adobe's first application that has a Cocoa back end for the Mac port. They rolled their own language bridge to Lua and over 40% of the entire Lightroom code base was written in Lua.) In our OSG case though, Objective-C is probably the best language for the job because of C-superset properties and its ability to directly coexist with C++ without having to go through language bridges. Thanks, Eric _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users http://www.openscenegraph.org/
