WinObjC – The Windows Bridge for iOS | Hacker News Reader

WinObjC – The Windows Bridge for iOS

github.com

65 pointszerr16 comments

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I miss Objective-C, it’s just so darn readable (once you know what @ and [] do)

I wholeheartedly agree. I had a great time in Objective-C.

Yes Objective-C is THE C with objects.

I do not understand why Microsoft stopped this effort.

Paired with Win32 is easier than C++.

Missing reference to 2015/2016.

Oh, they've got a well-structured roadmap with milestones. Surely, this is will be a long-lasting bridge. And last commit was 3 years ago. And "This repository was archived by the owner on May 28, 2025. It is now read-only."

It's dead but still around. This is the stuff ripe for Jia Tan v4.0 to revive and backdoor.

Interesting, I never knew about this. I do remember that NeXT ported OPENSTEP to Windows NT as OPENSTEP Enterprise.

I still have WebObjects 4.5.2, but could not get hands on the YellowBox

Microsoft's timing was the worst. I think they announced this a year after Swift was already announced, but before Swift was open sourced. So Microsoft wouldn't be able to deal with things like Obj-C/Swift interop which iOS developers were already jumping onto. And Microsoft's Windows 8 mobile initiative was pretty clearly a flop by this point.

Frankly, this Obj-C effort needed to be done way earlier, starting with AppKit, like back when Microsoft was panicking that OS X 10.4 Tiger was going to kick Longhorn's butt. If these tools had already been proven useful before the dawn of the iPhone, Microsoft might have had a chance of riding the iOS wave.

I think a separate objective-c runtime was ported to windows by apple for itunes and later safari to work.

If I recall correctly, iTunes was a Carbon application. They ported parts of the Carbon APIs to get it running on Windows.

I do remember it had its own font rendering which looked out of place on Windows.

QuickTime for Windows existed long before then, and Apple ported a bunch of the old Classic Mac Toolbox to Windows as part of that.

IIRC it was actually this Windows port of Toolbox that in some ways laid the foundation for Carbon - i.e. a port of the Toolbox API to what became Mac OS X.

Yes, this is correct.

Interesting stuff, I wish there was a way it would get open sourced one day.

There seem to be bunch of DLLs in iTunes and Safari with familiar names.

Would have been good if someone made bindings for them, it would have been interesting to see what MacOS like stuff could work there, even if it just python bindings.

There is also GNUStep.

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