Re:Ladybird: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift...
by stephc_int13 on Thursday February 19, 2026 @12:10AM
(#47070156)
C.
Re:Ladybird: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift...
by addaon on Thursday February 19, 2026 @12:32AM
(#47070284)
C's a great language in 1985, and a great starting point. But development of UI software is one of those areas where object oriented software really shines. What if we could get all the advantages of C as a procedural language, but graft on top an extremely lightweight object system with a spec of < 20 pages to take advantage of these new 1980s-era developments in software engineering, while keeping 100% of the maturity and performance of the C ecosystem? We could call it Objective-C.
Re:Ladybird: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift...
by mpweiher on Monday February 23, 2026 @04:33PM
(#47129190)
And Objective-C is C. A strict superset, in fact.
If
[aView display];
really, really, really isn't to your liking, you can write objc_msgSend( aView, @selector(display));
or even: objc_msgSend( aView, sel_registerName("display"));
That's pretty much all there is to it. But I have to admit I like the syntax better: [aView display];
What language would you have suggested for that mission and that era? Self or Smalltalk and give up on performance on 25-MHz-class processors? C or Pascal and give up an excellent object system with dynamic dispatch?