Objective-C

And the other thing is that during these development times, the technology also evolves.

If you're talking about MUNE, for instance, where we started about 2005, We started with Objective-C and some of the frameworks then we used WebObjects at the time.

WebObjects we still use for many of the projects, unfortunately, because there is no better replacement of EUF, not because of the WebObject itself, the web part of the WebObjects, but

EUF.

So, yeah, and all the stuff with the garbage collection and all the problems there.

So for this type of thing, Swift is extremely good and extremely fast, predictable.

What we are missing with Swift, unfortunately, is the dynamic loading that we had in Objective-C, loadable bundles.

Yeah, so how do you get around that? Well, with ugly threats.

Like, if you're a small app developer and you're like, ah, like, yeah, 1% of my audience is using the iPhone Duo.

Do I really want to open up Xcode and sit there and rewrite all the views and get an Objective-C or Swift and actually hammer out, you know, a layout that looks good? If you can...

Point an AI agent at this and get it to get you 90% of the way there.

Maybe you'll do it a little bit faster.

I tell you

this whole story because neither of us knew Swift or Objective-C terribly.

I mean, I know some C, but I don't spend a lot of time in it day to day.

And the journey

So I kind of wanted to try it out.

Originally to write apps for the iPhone, you had to write in Objective-C.

And then later they created this new language that was similar but better in a number of ways called Swift.

And that was probably like 10 years ago now or something.

So Kotlin and Java both compile to identical JVM bytecode.

and offer matching runtime performance, but they differ in syntax, safety, and ecosystem focus.

Okay, so I think that is actually really similar to how Swift and Objective-C are.

I believe that Swift, that was the same sort of thing of like, let's make the language, the syntax, and things like that better to work with, but it still kind of compiles down to the same thing, I believe.

We need to look at the engine under the hood, the Swift programming language itself.

Historically, Apple developers used Objective-C.

Which was powerful, but archaic and honestly pretty clunky.

Swift was introduced to modernize the ecosystem.

But if that image fails to load, that pointer might point to nothing.

It's null.

and C or Objective-C, if the app tries to process that null pointer as if it were actual data, it triggers a segmentation fault and the app instantly crashes.

We have all experienced that as users.

It can be.

Um, and, you know, we have Objective-C, which is my favorite language.

I think it's, it's beautiful.

Um, you know, we have Swift, which is not really replacing Objective-C, but it's a-another language that's been getting more mature and more threat actors have been leveraging.

Uh, we have Go, you know, which everyone is dealing with.

We have Rust, which is, which is a mess, honestly.

Well, yeah, no, there's, there's more to it, so it's a very good and fair question.

We were pretty far down the pike having selected Berkeley distribution as the foundation, and we made a series of other choices, which I'm sure you want to talk about around what we're gonna do with Interface Builder and object orientation and, and Objective-C as opposed to C++ and all the things that went into the whole stack were really important.

And we were licensing a lot.

I mean, the compilers we licensed from Richard Stallman at MIT, that was my turf, right? I was smart enough to know what I didn't know when I was at Apple, and so the university people adopted me when I would just say, "I don't know, tell me." And then they were educating me all the time, so I was learning who was doing what where in the university community and how that could be pieced together into what they wanted at the end of the day.

But he was at Inria in, in France, where he did a lot of the early research, and he's a professor academic type as well.

But he was just a super gentle person and, and a genius in the field at that moment in time of thinking through how to build a kit, if you will, that would sit on top of the object library that would let you build these things.

And because of the choice that, again, William and Bud Tribble were party to of Objective-C and the notion of dynamic binding at runtime was key.

And that's-- Everybody else had gone another direction with, you know, C++ and, a- and the rest.

That is why the Pixel 9 ships with 12GB and the Pixel 9 Pro with 16GB, and why every Googlebook starts at 16GB.

Apple uses Automatic Reference Counting , which the compiler builds directly into Swift and Objective-C code.

Objects are freed the instant nothing references them, with no scan, no pause and no big free buffer.

On top of that, macOS compresses cold memory in place instead of paging it to disk.