It's amazing and sad for computing that somehow managing to use a sane language to develop software for a very commonly used platform is seen as a serious feat of accomplishment.
IMHO it depends, C/C++ work very nicely with immediate mode UI frameworks, for example nuklear [1], imgui [2]. Though retained mode C/C++ UI frameworks are also quite popular, for example Qt, wxWidgets, GTK.
Ummm... I wrote plenty of GUI code in C and so did lots of other people back in the late '80s and early '90s. Quite common. I don't know what it would mean for it to have been "designed to create" GUIs; it's a general-purpose language.
There's Carbon as well, which was replaced by Cocoa. And as of 4 years ago (and I suspect today as well) there are still some things which you could only do in the Carbon's C APIs, so lots of CoreFoundation types which you can bridge directly from their objective C equivalents. Pretty neat stuff how well the backwards compatibility works.
I've even seen several games that use it directly for keyboard handling and such to this day. And all the new, fancy GUI frameworks which exist on Windows are basically just wrappers on top of WinAPI.
Unless something has changed drastically since when I was at MS, the Windows kernel and the major OS DLLs is pretty much pure C. The GUI/window manager are more C++.
Even Word and Excel were still C (although Office shared much C++ code in a common DLL)
"Going native" meant salvaging Vista's low performance by rewriting everything in C++ that was written in .NET -- .NET was the "wave" here, but it's also the culprit for Vista eating memory like cheap sushi.
Yet, the replacement of Win32 API model is with everything being written in the original design of .NET, with AOT native compilation and classes being COM objects.
What killed Vista was politics between OSDev and DevTools units.
I had a project once that required me to build a GUI in C using Motif. It was a joy to use. I recall there was a simple concept called RowColumn. All the GUI widgets were either in a Row or in a Column. It was highly orthogonal and allowed you to build good-looking UI's that acted in a reasonable way when resized, etc.
I don't know who you've been talking to, but that's ridiculous. C++ is one of the most widely-used languages for writing native apps for any OS. Adobe products, Chrome, anything built with Qt, even the Swift language itself, all made in C++.
Adobe products have codebases going back decades, of course they are written in C/C++. Furthermore most Adobe apps have fairly advanced processing needs that your run-of-the-mill CRUD GUI does not.
> anything built with Qt
Qt isn't even stock C++, they had to hack a meta-compiler on top of C++ to effectively serve the needs of their GUI system.
> even the Swift language itself
By this logic, thousands of GUI apps are written in x86 assembly.
Between C#, Objective-C, Swift, JS+Electron, Mono, and many other mature, high-level frameworks that don't trash memory at the slightest provocation, youd need some very good reasons to use C or C++ for a GUI app these days.
Most apple platform apps are written in mostly objc or Swift and not C++, I wouldn’t say it is one of the most widely used languages on these platforms by any means. The Cocoa SDK exposes an objc interface so many system framework calls have to use swift or objc.
Secondly, compilers are a very different programming task to developing GUI apps; the Swift team choosing to use it has nothing to do with Apple’s assessment of how you should write an application—Apple are the people who have been leading objc development (they own the objc IP) in the last 10 years and use it in all first party apps and many system frameworks.
It depends, most of important and heavy lifting stuff in Apple platform, aka Core frameworks, are written in C, for example a quote from Core Text documentation [1]:
> Many of the low level libraries in OS X and iOS are written in plain C for speed and simplicity.
And don't forget that OSX/iOS are based on Darwin BSD, where most of heavy lifting is done by programs written in C.
Yeah, I still wouldn’t say that c++ is “one of the most widely-used languages for writing native apps” for OS X.
And internally apple use other languages a lot, but frameworks like UIKit, AppKit, and many of the other public frameworks they expose in the SDK are objc, with foundation for example abstracting a lot of CoreFoundation C code.
Perhaps most smaller apps, yes. And some big ones too. But a very significant percentage of the commercial software industry writes apps for OSX in C++, including Autodesk, Adobe, many major games written using engines like Unreal and Unity (which also support other languages), etc.
That's not a knock against anyone who does or doesn't write apps in a particular language; but folks should know what the reality is, and Objective C or Swift are by no means the only or even necessarily the most profitable ways to writes apps for OSX, though those languages are perfectly fine for many circumstances.
This is a very particular crowd, largely into web software and ecosystems for rapid growth of SaaS. I wouldn't extrapolate this crowd into software languages in general. You should always use the best tool for the job.
Many people write quite excellent software in C/C++ every day. Just as many people use chainsaws, drive cars, fire guns and take pills every day. These are all productive activities with low floors and high ceilings. Anyone can jump in and make a mess. It takes care and attention to do them well.
Gah, this. Also noobs who want to "replace their 2,000 device-per-year microcontroller application with an FPGA so that it can someday be put onto a ASIC." They're basically vinyl hipsters who fancy themselves "EE/chip designerz" and want to immortalize themselves.
> It's more or less subject to the same "pitfalls" that go against C
Only if you write C code in Objective-C.
> PLUS it is a syntactical nightmare.
[whatTheHell:is this:shit];
Honestly, get over it. This is largely a surface-level detail that makes no difference once youve used the language for more than a week. I take it you have similar complaints against Ruby, Python, Lisp, or any other language that dares to break ranks with the C++/Java syntax idiom.
> Is ARC really that much of a savior here?
Yes, manual memory management is one of the main things that C/C++ programmers seem to consistently screw up.
> Yes, manual memory management is one of the main things that C/C++ programmers seem to consistently screw up.
There's no reason why memory management _should_ be something that C++ programmers screw up now with containers like smart_ptr and std::string. Yes, if you malloc/free stuff and use things like memcpy, you're playing with fire, but the whole point of "modern C++" is that we have better and safer alternatives.
On the other hand, Obj-C message passing (which really means method calls that are resolved at runtime) is another way, like manual memory management, to really shoot yourself in the foot if you make a mistake.
> I take it you have similar complaints against Ruby, Python, Lisp, or any other language that dares to break ranks with the C++/Java syntax idiom.
I actually don't. Forced named parameters and "array brackets" denote method calls are arguably poor choices for syntax.
On the other hand, getting rid of semicolons and enforcing whitespace a la Python is okay, and Lisp is really just an extension of RPN.
The point is your point that I dislike anything by default that is "not C/C++/Java" is actually pretty incorrect.
I do have opinions, but that isn't the basis through which they are formed, and quite honestly, I'm offended that you even made such an assumption about me in the first place.
> Honestly, get over it.
Bad advice, I'm allowed to have an opinion (and I do substantiate it above).
Regardless, I have "gotten over it" given that a large portion of my day job is spent writing Obj-C, and while I do like it better than Java as a language overall (even not having to deal with JNI for interop is a dream), god help the syntax.
Unsubstantiated complaints of "omg brackets" were already tiring in 2008 when they were repeatedly voiced by many the new Objective-C programmers flocking to iOS development. If you have some reasoning for why Objective C's message passing syntax is bad, please voice it. (You haven't.) Otherwise you are just adding noise to the discussion.
You've already made the point that my opinion is a popular one. To wit, I find it amusing that the Google autocomplete for "Objective C syntax" is "horrible."
