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Comment by natesm | Hacker News Reader

They're hardly separate things at this point, @autoreleasepool? The new @[] and @{} constructors for NSArray and NSDictionary? ARC enforces retain/release/autorelease, which are NSObject protocol methods. NSString isn't "part of" Objective-C, but the language has had special literals for a very long time.

I guess that isn't the entirety of Cocoa, but Objective-C and Foundation are very linked now.

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There's GNUStep, though I don't really know how far away from the Cocoa moving target it is at the moment.

http://www.gnustep.org/

There is quite a lot implemented, they are trying to follow (as much as reousrces allow).

Btw. since February there is GNUstep repository on github: https://github.com/gnustep (base = Foundation, gui = AppKit)

FWIW, I was reading the article as someone with no Objective-C experience (outside of skimming a few references) and I could tell he was talking about a library rather than a language. It'd almost be analogous to writing an article titled "In praise of Javascript" and proceed to talk about jQuery functionality. jQuery has certainly had an impact on the Javascript language; but the two (despite popular opinion to the contrary) remain entirely distinct.

> but the two (despite popular opinion to the contrary) remain entirely distinct.

This isn't the case in Objective-C though.

@"foo" is an instance of the NSString class, which is a part of the Foundation library. However, it has its own special syntax. Now, Apple is adding @[] and @{}, which are NSArray and NSDictionary instances.

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