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by archagon 4106 days ago
Not OP, and I agree that Objective-C is great. However, it is potentially troubling, from a performance standpoint, that practically everything is allocated on the heap. There's no support in the language for stack-allocated objects, for example. Now that I've used Swift in production, I also really miss generics. Casting to and from containers gets really annoying and unsafe!
2 comments
seanalltogether 4105 days ago
"that practically everything is allocated on the heap"

That's kind of the point though. If you want something on the stack, you write plain old C structs or work with primitives. There's plenty of this happening throughout the cocoa frameworks. On the other hand, if you find yourself writing C structures to the heap in objc, you're probably wasting your effort.

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gurkendoktor 4106 days ago
> practically everything is allocated on the heap

It has gotten a lot better thanks to tagged pointers: https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2012-07-27-lets-bui...

Objective C is mostly used for UI code, and I think it's a fantastic language for that, with its Ruby-like weak typing and strong metaprogramming capabilities.

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