Objective-C is a pure superset of C created by Brad Cox and Tom Love in 1986. They licensed the language to NeXT in 1988, and for a long time NeXT was the only major supplier of tools for the language.
The Free Software Foundation often quotes Objective-C as a success story for the GPL. Steve Naroff wrote initial support for Objective-C in the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), but NeXT did not wish to distribute this code. Instead, it shipped a binary object file and required users to link it to their copy of GCC, attempting to circumvent the requirements of the GPL. The Free Software Foundation eventually forced NeXT to release its code. The story, unfortunately, does not end here. The compiler is only half of the problem. Objective-C also requires a runtime library, which handles things like module loading, class lookup, and message sending. The compiler is little more than a C preprocessor that turns Objective-C syntax into calls to this library. The first Objective-C compilers and the open source Portable Object Compiler (POC) worked in this way.
NeXT did not release its own runtime library, so the Free Software Foundation was forced to write its own. They did and included a few small improvements, making the two incompatible. The Objective-C support in GCC began to fill with #ifdef statements for the GNU and NeXT runtimes. Over the next decade, these interfaces diverged more and more, until eventually there was very little shared code. NeXT (later Apple) never incorporated the code for the GNU runtime into its GCC branch, and so incorporating improvements made by Apple was increasingly difficult.
In 2005, Apple started working with the Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) project and hired some of its lead developers. They used it for the CPU-based OpenGL shader implementation on 10.5 and began using it for code generation with GCC. This was motivated in part by GCC’s switch to GPLv3. In 2007, they began working on a new front end. Like LLVM itself, the new front end, called Clang, is BSD licensed. I wrote the original implementation of code generation for Objective-C with this compiler, and it has maintained a clean separation between the runtime-specific and runtime-agnostic parts. The GNU runtime back end is under a thousand lines of code, making it much easier to maintain and keep feature parity with the Apple implementation. This means that, in the long run, Objective-C support on other platforms is likely to improve.
Objective-C was created at a time when Smalltalk was seen as powerful but too slow. The hardware required to run the Smalltalk-80 environment was very expensive. Objective-C was a compromise. It removed some of the features of Smalltalk, most notable closures and garbage collection, and added the rest to C. Since Objective-C had flow control constructs from C, closures were less important. In Smalltalk, they were the only way of doing flow control; if you wanted an if statement, you’d send an ifTrue: message to a value with a closure as an argument, and it would execute it or not, depending on whether its value were true. Objective-C lost some of this flexibility but gained a lot of speed in return. Apple added blocks with 10.6, but they are considerably less flexible than Smalltalk blocks and do not support reflection.
Because Objective-C is a pure superset of C, every C program is a valid C
program. Some new types are defined, such as id (any object) and Class, but these are defined as C types in a header and so are subject to the same scoping rules as other C types. This is in contrast with C++, where class is a keyword. A C program with a variable named class is not a valid C++ program.
In addition to the types, Objective-C includes a small number of new keywords. All of these are prefixed by the @ symbol, preventing them from clashing with existing C identifiers.
Source of Information : Addison Wesley - Cocoa Programming Developers Handbook (December 2009)
The Free Software Foundation often quotes Objective-C as a success story for the GPL. Steve Naroff wrote initial support for Objective-C in the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), but NeXT did not wish to distribute this code. Instead, it shipped a binary object file and required users to link it to their copy of GCC, attempting to circumvent the requirements of the GPL. The Free Software Foundation eventually forced NeXT to release its code. The story, unfortunately, does not end here. The compiler is only half of the problem. Objective-C also requires a runtime library, which handles things like module loading, class lookup, and message sending. The compiler is little more than a C preprocessor that turns Objective-C syntax into calls to this library. The first Objective-C compilers and the open source Portable Object Compiler (POC) worked in this way.
NeXT did not release its own runtime library, so the Free Software Foundation was forced to write its own. They did and included a few small improvements, making the two incompatible. The Objective-C support in GCC began to fill with #ifdef statements for the GNU and NeXT runtimes. Over the next decade, these interfaces diverged more and more, until eventually there was very little shared code. NeXT (later Apple) never incorporated the code for the GNU runtime into its GCC branch, and so incorporating improvements made by Apple was increasingly difficult.
In 2005, Apple started working with the Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) project and hired some of its lead developers. They used it for the CPU-based OpenGL shader implementation on 10.5 and began using it for code generation with GCC. This was motivated in part by GCC’s switch to GPLv3. In 2007, they began working on a new front end. Like LLVM itself, the new front end, called Clang, is BSD licensed. I wrote the original implementation of code generation for Objective-C with this compiler, and it has maintained a clean separation between the runtime-specific and runtime-agnostic parts. The GNU runtime back end is under a thousand lines of code, making it much easier to maintain and keep feature parity with the Apple implementation. This means that, in the long run, Objective-C support on other platforms is likely to improve.
Objective-C was created at a time when Smalltalk was seen as powerful but too slow. The hardware required to run the Smalltalk-80 environment was very expensive. Objective-C was a compromise. It removed some of the features of Smalltalk, most notable closures and garbage collection, and added the rest to C. Since Objective-C had flow control constructs from C, closures were less important. In Smalltalk, they were the only way of doing flow control; if you wanted an if statement, you’d send an ifTrue: message to a value with a closure as an argument, and it would execute it or not, depending on whether its value were true. Objective-C lost some of this flexibility but gained a lot of speed in return. Apple added blocks with 10.6, but they are considerably less flexible than Smalltalk blocks and do not support reflection.
Because Objective-C is a pure superset of C, every C program is a valid C
program. Some new types are defined, such as id (any object) and Class, but these are defined as C types in a header and so are subject to the same scoping rules as other C types. This is in contrast with C++, where class is a keyword. A C program with a variable named class is not a valid C++ program.
In addition to the types, Objective-C includes a small number of new keywords. All of these are prefixed by the @ symbol, preventing them from clashing with existing C identifiers.
Source of Information : Addison Wesley - Cocoa Programming Developers Handbook (December 2009)
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