Return of the Objective-C Jedi

[[[ These ]]] are your father's square brackets, the weapons of a Jedi Knight.
Not as clumsy or random as C++.
Elegant weapons for a more civilized age.

• Apple's Objective-C books used to be top-notch, but they've been neglected and the new doc site doesn't link to them. There's PDFs at various sites.
• Cocoa Dev Central: Tutorials, books, and aggregation of other Cocoa-programming sites. You may need to use the wayback machine to read some of them.

What's Different in Mulle-ObjC

• MulleFoundation
• blog post
• feature list

  ObjC 1.0:      C  plus Smalltalk
      <- appeasement of the Java Noobs
  ObjC++
  ObjC 2.0
      <- usurpation by the C++ Flagellants
  

This is like Objective-C circa 2010(?), good but not fully baked. Far better than circa 1986-2009, when it was a very thin translation layer over C.

• No ARC (Automatic Reference Counting). This is just invisible sugar to hide retain/release/autorelease, and while ARC's convenient, it's trivial if you actually know how reference counting works. Don't really miss it.
• No dot property syntax. [[myObj name] length] instead of myObj.name.length, and [myObj setName:newName] instead of myObj.name = newName. I can live with it, but I really did like dot syntax, even if it does "overload" the . operator and hide the distinction between methods and variables.
  • When dot syntax came out, Objective-C nerds came close to fistfights over this. You would not believe the venom some people had for it. Most of those nerds died or quit or got old & tired before fucking Swift came around, I guess.
• No array syntax. [myList objectAtIndex:i] instead of myList[i]. This is a pain in the ass, I'll have to write some shorthand macros (or rather, go dig them out of my very oldest code).
• No blocks. This one hurts, but it's a reasonable pick-your-battles decision. Classic: Write a method, dispatch to it, and call back success somehow. Blocks: create a weakSelf reference, enclose it, search-replace self in your block, pick one of a half-dozen complex GCD methods, get a memory leak because you retained something across the block boundary. This is annoying but logically simpler:

  [self performSelectorInBackground:@selector(computeData) withObject:inputData];
  
  - (void)computeData:(id)inputData {
      // create outputData
      [self setOutputData:outputData];
      [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] postNotification:NOTI_DataComputed];
  }
  

• Has object literals: @42 and @(var) create an NSNumber, @[] creates an NSArray, @{} creates an NSDictionary; dicts use key:value order, not the reverse order used in -[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:], and array and dicts don't need a trailing nil, which was a constant source of mystifying bugs back in the day. Big win!
  • Hmn, crashes if you do something janky like [@[] mutableCopy]: mulle_objc_universe 0x1006adef0 fatal: unknown method 5e1b0403 "-getObjects:range:" in class 7aa0d636 "_MulleObjCEmptyArray"
• Has for (id x in container) loops, using NSFastEnumeration. The 1.0 process of looping enumerations was awful, so this is very nice.
• Huh, does have @autoreleasepool, so maybe I should use that instead of NSAutoreleasePool like a caveman? It compiles and seems to work.
• Properties have properties assign/retain nonatomic/atomic nonnullable readonly, default is assign nonatomic, no "nullable" or "readwrite" flags needed. As it should be.
• Weird isa define instead of pointer: blog post

TODO

• I haven't set up an NSRunLoop or the equivalent of NSApplication (which is in AppKit, not Foundation), need to do that and then I'll have a working app template.