D versus Objective C Comparison

[Michel Fortin]

On 2009-01-31 15:39:17 -0500, Chris R Miller 
<lordsauronthegreat at gmail.com> said:

> Anyways, I decided to write up a comparison of the two languages from a 
> less technical, more deployment oriented standpoint.  IOW, examining 
> how well they perform for the last mile of development: deploying 
> software.

You talk about IDEs in there, and praise Xcode. Do you know about D for Xcode?
<http://michelf.com/projects/d-for-xcode/>

And since have you taken a look at my D/Objective-C bridge?
<http://michelf.com/projects/d-objc/>

Unfortunately, these two projects aren't getting much attention these 
days, mostly because I can't do much with the current state of the one 
D compiler that runs on my PowerPC iBook.

One area I think Objective-C to be very great and that you haven't 
touched is for creating stable APIs. In Objective-C, contrary to D and 
C++, you don't have to recompile every dependency when reordering, 
adding and removing member functions in a class. In 64-bit Objective-C 
2.0, you can even add variables to a class without care about 
recompiling derived classes. Compare that to D, where exposing a class 
as a public API will either force you to not change much that class, or 
force your users to recompile every time you make such a change.


> Also, I do honor the right of reply.  If there's something I have 
> written that is now incorrect or inaccurate I will of course change my 
> page to reflect that.  Heck, all the comparisons in the world are 
> worthless if they aren't accurate!

Well there's one error:

"If you ignore Cocoa, then there is the GNUStep [gnustep.org] project, 
which is an Open-Source implementation of the old Carbon standard from 
NeXT Step."

No. Carbon was created to ease port of classic Mac OS applications to 
Mac OS X. It's a revamped version of the Mac OS Toolbox, which got some 
additions as Mac OS X evolved. It has nothing to do with NeXT.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(API)>


-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/