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by pjmlp 4400 days ago
I remember Apple representatives promising to a room full of CERN researchers that the JavaBridge wasn't going away and how Java was a first class language for Mac OS X development.
2 comments
weegee101 4400 days ago
This is not even remotely similar to that situation. Obj-C is far more important & integrated than I think you realize.
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pjmlp 4400 days ago
I know Objective-C since 1999, when I had to port some software from NeXT to Windows, so I do know a few things about it.

From my point of view, many will jump to Swift if given the chance.

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gress 4400 days ago
You are misunderstanding - this isn't about which is better. Almost all new application code will be written in Swif, but swift doesn't bridge between C and the Swift/obj-c runtime, so Objective-C will continue to be required for writing the glue layer.
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pjmlp 4400 days ago
Yes it does.

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...

Additionally, this is just version 1.0. So nothing rules out that if Apple sees the language being widely adopted, other improvements in the FFI area aren't made.

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gress 4400 days ago
I stand corrected, and your argument holds, however there is a great deal of objective-c code out there, so it will take a long time to go away.
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weegee101 4400 days ago
Yes, and I think people should head to Swift if it fits their needs. That is very different from Objective-C losing support however. Objective-C is not going away.
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scott_karana 4400 days ago
How many people actually wrote Cocoa apps in Java?

The only Java apps of the era that I remember used non-native UIs, and were painful.

Whereas I'd be shocked if Swift wasn't adopted wholesale by iOS developers.

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pjmlp 4400 days ago
This is not about the present.

Rather back when Mac OS X 10.0 was being released and Apple was unsure if developers would be willing to write Objective-C code.

They created their own JVM, with Objective-C runtime support (JavaBridge) and let the developers choose.

At the same time, Apple representatives did sessions at UNIX heavy user groups, like CERN, where they sold Mac OS X as a better BSD, and Java as first class language was part of the feature list.

As they saw developers were comfortable adopting Objective-C in their toolchains, the JavaBridge was dropped.

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