D/Objective-C Preliminary Design

[Walter Bright]

Michel Fortin wrote:
> You heard that right: someone is considering writing Cocoa programs 
> because of D!

That's great news!

> I think we should try to attract Cocoa programmers (and would-be Cocoa 
> programmers) by offering them the strengths of D. What are those 
> strengths? Some are things you probably take for given (overloading), 
> others are design by contract, generic programming, nested classes, 
> mixins, integrated unittests and documentation, memory safety, a 
> race-free threading model, did I miss anything? All those good things 
> aren't available in Objective-C and thus can't be used with Cocoa. I 
> want to make those them available to Cocoa programmers. And for this, I 
> need them to work with the Objective-C object model. By making 
> Objective-C objects bind to D semantics, all those feature will "just 
> work" with Cocoa with minimal changes to the frontend (and well written 
> bindings).


I don't know O-C. I've never written a line of it. So I'm shooting in the dark 
about the best way to attach it to D.

I agree with all your goals.

One possibility: simply adopt O-C syntax.