> Honestly you would have gotten %80-%90 of the benefits of swift by making Obj-C use a new syntax that looked like swift and continued to improve Obj-C as a language than what you would have gotten with swift. A lot of the ugly of obj-c could have been translated away with very simple 1:1 syntactic sugar macros.
This is a common talking point I hear in the Objective-C community, but nobody has come up with a credible design or implementation of "incrementally evolve Objective-C and drop the C part" beyond stating that it's trivial, etc.
“Hypothetical” being the key word here, though. These proposals are all thin on details, and if it was so easy someone would’ve made such a language by now.
That's a bit bad faith, making a language is never easy and takes a ton of resources.
Swift is the bandwagon at Apple due to how Chris Latner started the project and his clout and I think it would be politically untenable to make ObjectiveSwift going against that, especially now at Apple.
Nobody else but apple would make ObjectiveSwift too, because for better or worst ObjC & Swift are languages that are for the apple platform and nothing else. If you don't need to make something for apple, and you're going to do it without major tech company sponsorship, then you have freedom and you go make things like Rust, Nim or Elm instead.
With all of Swift's problems, I would never recommend it for a server side platform, and it's adoption shows that reality.
Because of all of the above, you'll only see hypothetical proposals, no implementations.
> Nobody else but apple would make ObjectiveSwift too, because for better or worst ObjC & Swift are languages that are for the apple platform and nothing else.
What about all the work done to support Swift on Linux? I had thought that was mostly done by the community rather than from Apple itself, but I could be wrong
It is as successful as the work done to support Objective-C and GNUStep.
It is interesting that it works, and some folks might even create some products that use it, but it won't ever take the world by storm.
Similarly like Mono was never that much relevant, with Miguel and others ended up creating Xamarin and focusing on mobile instead.
.NET nowadays has a good story on Linux, because now it matters to Microsoft to make it relevant, and yet most UNIX shops would rather go with Java, Rust, Go,....
I agree that it isn't super commonly used, but I was responding to the assertion that no one would bother making an Objective-C replacement for non-Apple platforms. Clearly some people are interested in spending time extending Apple languages for non-Apple platform purposes, so the idea that the only thing stopping people from making a "better" Objective-C is lack of support for third party platforms seems kind of strange to me. If it really were not that difficult to make a better Objective-C and enough people were interested, it seems like it would have happened regardless of official support by Apple for third party platforms. Either the interest isn't there in the first place, or it's not nearly as easy a problem as suggested.
This is a common talking point I hear in the Objective-C community, but nobody has come up with a credible design or implementation of "incrementally evolve Objective-C and drop the C part" beyond stating that it's trivial, etc.