D versus Objective C Comparison

[Chris R Miller]

Michel Fortin wrote:
> 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/>

I never got that working with Xcode 3.0, so I decided to ignore it.

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

Unfortunately not.  I don't have any compilable D code to bridge to 
Objective-C.

> 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.

Hm, that'd certainly be an impediment to continuing work with D.

> 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.

Hm, I didn't know that.  I'm not sure it is exactly pertinent to the 
main focus, which is towards quickly building software which can then be 
deployed to a user base relatively quickly and easily.  I just glossed 
over some language features to give a small peek at the language's 
killer features according to me.  D's most cool trick is the ability to 
implement the functionality of many data structures through use of its 
array syntax, and Objective-C is cool 'cause it's C with objects, sans 
all the crazy complexity that you run into with C++.

>> 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)>

Yikes, I'm just full of hot air today, aren't I?

Fixed.  :-)