Heron's Perch

When NeXT still existed and the black hardware was a thing, Steve Jobs made the announcement that OPENSTEP would be created and that the object model, not the operating system and not the hardware, was the important thing.

This is a concept that Apple has forgotten. With it's push towards Apple Silicon and a walled-garden, Apple has committed itself to the same pitfall that NeXT fell into. NeXT lacked the infrastructure to handle OPENSTEP running on multiple kinds of hardware, but the object model on different OSes was successful... this is evident in OPENSTEP1.1 for Solaris and OPENSTEP for NT.

GNUstep attempts to reach the same goal, but provides the APIs that are available with Cocoa. The object model IS the important thing and this is why GNUstep is so important. It breaks the walled garden and makes it possible for users to run their apps and tools on other operating systems. GNUstep HASN'T forgotten and we believe this is a core concept that Apple has left behind.

A little history first. Keysight is a large company that, primarily, makes testing equipment such as oscilloscopes and other electronics. They bought a company a few years back named TestPlant. Prior to that, TestPlant bought a company by the name of Redstone that produced a product known as Eggplant. Recently, I was laid off for economic reasons (at least that's what they said). It occurs to me that nothing in this world lasts forever. I was so depressed when I was let go because Keysight was the perfect home for me... they used GNUstep deeply. So, as you can imagine, I was deeply upset when things ended... but all things do.

Recently, I saw this article regarding ObjCs "end of life" from JetBrains.

The tiobe index seems to disagree. It’s also important to remember that jetbrains recently had to take down their AppCode application (which sucked) since it didn’t sell.
Jetbrains is the creator of the kotlin language so they have a vested interest in their android customers. I would take their “index” with a grain of salt to say the least.

While it is certain that Apple won’t be investing into thing beyond ObjC 2.0, it is foolhardy to think that ObjC is going away anytime soon since there is an enormous installed base of stable code, not the least of which is Foundation and AppKit themselves. Also consider CocoaPods.

So, no, not worried about it. Also… look at Java and COBOL. For years people have declared the end of both languages. Java is still popular, though not in vogue and COBOL while not one of the “cool kids” has literally billions of lines of code being maintained and new code being written every year. This (admittedly biased as it is by the CTO of MicroFocus) article gives some reasons why….

Here is the article about COBOL...

Plus… Apple already has a mechanism for automatically allowing objc and swift to work together. Take a look at the frameworks in Xcode and you’ll notice some files called *.apinotes. These are YAML files that are used by the compiler to allow easy integration into swift projects. So, essentially, if Apple writes an ObjC version of a framework they get the swift version for absolutely free (minus the cost of writing the YAML file). If they write a swift only version they don’t get that benefit.

So, yeah, in conclusion… Yes, ObjC is NOT on the rise, but reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated! ;)

PS. That being said, Apple dumping ObjC might spell a boom for us as all of the people who have installed codebases would suddenly need support for it either on macOS (on which we don’t currently work) or on other platforms. Something to think about…

PPS. All of the above being said. I admit I wouldn’t be terribly shocked to hear from Apple that “we have dropped support for the legacy objc language to provide you with the best support for our new swift language to make it the ‘greatest developer experience in the world’” or some grotesque BS like that. Lol

GC

Some interesting notes. I will update this posting as i find more: * https://dart.dev/guides/libraries/objective-c-interop

As the much villified theme for star trek enterprise says "its been a long road getting from there to here" i am almost done with all of the work that needed to be done to get us to Catalina compatibility in GNUstep. The reason this is still significant is because Apple hasn't made many changes to either the Foundation or AppKit APIs since then. I have been workinf hard over the last three years. All of the new classes are fully tested. Once this effort is completed I am going to focus on printing, which has always been a problem in GS. And possibly a "reference" distribution.

I have worked hard to get it to this point, but all of the classes in Catalina are now present in GNUstep's base implementation. Soon, all of the classes available in AppKit will also be available in GNUstep's GUI implementation. Please contribute to the project via patreon.... Become a Patron!

For the record, when I say "modern" I do NOT mean the current, old, NeXTSTEP based theme with new widgets. I mean a redesigned one.

What new features would you most like to see in GNUstep going forward? Swift support is already happening...

— Gregory Casamento (@bheron) December 28, 2015

Back in July Apple promised to open source Swift. :) Well, Apple? What's going on? Is this still the plan, Apple?