Hacker News Reader

Comment by bdfh42 | Hacker News Reader

If this is a contest - then I declare "No Contest".

C++ is a standards based language available across multiple platforms and the other one isn't.

So, I guess python, perl, and ruby would lose a contest to COBOL which has a ANSI / ISO standard[1] and is available across multiple platforms? I think implementation based standards have a place.

[1] http://webstore.ansi.org/RecordDetail.aspx?sku=INCITS%2fISO%...

> C++ is a standards based language

Technically untrue, C++ is a standardized language, the standard was created after the language. Ada is a standards-based language. So's haskell. The first C++ implementation (as well as "The C++ Programming Language") were released in 1985, while the first C++ "standard" was released in 1998 (ISO/IEC 14882:1998).

> available across multiple platforms and the other one isn't.

Objective-C is available on pretty much any platform on which GCC or Clang runs, actually.

Objective C is available anywhere GCC is available (i.e., essentially everywhere).

How I wish this were true. For example, lack of Objective-C and Foundation in NaCl is my primary barrier to using it.

https://developers.google.com/native-client/faq#ProgrammingL...

Is there any actual incompatibility that prevents building an Objective-C runtime for NaCl, or is it simply a matter of ObjC not being included by default?

I've been thinking (warning: pure speculation ahead) that I could target my binaries to LLVM IR and then use the highly-experimental PNaCL. But who knows how long it will be before that is viable.

This is pure speculation, but its possible that the runtime does some tricks for performance (possibly in the method dispatch routine) that the NaCl sandbox doesn't allow.

Foundation is a diferent beast than Obj-C.

Obj-C is an open standard language. Foundation is a proprietary library with some key stuff even PATENTED by Apple (for example, the AutoRelease Pool falls into some of the Apple patents).

For most people, what makes Objective C so useful though is the Cocoa core classes. The GNUstep stuff has a lot of that functionality, but is not quite what the Apple stuff provides.

The article is from 1997...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com