Re: Cocoa et al as HCI usability problem

FROM : Sherm Pendley
DATE : Fri May 23 22:49:45 2008

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 9:34 AM, Gérard Iglesias <<email_removed>>
wrote:

> Le 23/05/08 à 15:26, "Ilan Volow" <<email_removed>> a écrit :
> >IMHO Objective-C 2.0 looks like Apple's attempt to make Objective-C
> >competitive with existing scripting languages, given the addition of
> >the dot syntax for accessors and garbage collection changes.
>
> No scripting languages, maybe Java and C#, I think :)



Agreed - I think Apple is interested in making Cocoa in general more
competitive, not just Objective-C. In fact, I suspect that their recent
increased interest in supporting scripting bridges for Cocoa may be at least
partly motivated by a need to compete with .NET's multi-language CLR.

Whatever the motivation, as a scripting bridge author I appreciate the
results - Leopard makes my job easier in a number of ways. :-)

The implementation of foreach appears almost expressly designed to better
support scripting languages. The ObjC foreach() syntax is just chrome - the
"fast" comes from under the hood. It compiles down to a single method that's
called to get a count of items and a C array of ids. For a scripting bridge,
an opportunity to replace several trips across the bridge per iteration with
a single round trip for the whole array is *huge*.

The bridgesupport scheme (originally from RubyCocoa) provides additional
meta-information that the ObjC runtime can't provide in a method signature
alone, such as flags that indicate if an id* argument is meant to be an
array of ids or an output argument, as well as info about things of which
the ObjC runtime is completely unaware, like C functions, struct, macro, and
enum definitions.

sherm--

--
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net