On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 11:07:03AM +0200, Toby wrote:
Enter Objective-C:
- STRICT SUPERSET OF C: every valid C program is a valid ObjC program.
This makes it trivial to include or link to C code and libraries and
to mix procedural, object-oriented and ASM code in the same *file*.
- SIMPLE: ObjC is plain C with one syntax addition and a few new
keywords. It only extends the C language to support Smalltalk-like
object-oriented features, because that's all you're going to need.
No more operator overloading, templates, references, 'const', etc.
- DYNAMICALLY TYPED: messages (method calls) are delivered according to
the dynamic type of the target object, not to some static type. This
is how Python works. You can even send an object a message that is
not specified in its interface. This might seem like a bad idea, but
instead it allows for powerful delegation-based design patterns.
- FAST: Objective-C performs dynamically bound message calls very
quickly, about 1.5-2.0 times as long as a plain C function call!
Really? When I benchmarked it, it was more like 2-20x in the real world
(with inlined functions and so on). Still, I'l agree ObjC is pretty good.
Its possible to do static pre-discovery of the message issuing, but then
the syntax get really ugly.
- Steve