David Chisnall takes a look behind the scenes at Apple's upcoming revamp of the Objective-C language. As with any new language, some things are good, some are ugly, and some are both.



Objective-C has a long and interesting history. In this article I’ll briefly reviews is past and present, and then dive into what the future holds for its latest incarnation.

The Past

Objective-C was created by Brad Cox in the early 1980s as a way of gaining the flexibility of Smalltalk without sacrificing compatibility with C code. The language gained some popularity as a result of being the basis of the first RAD environment, created by NeXT.

In 1992, the first GNU Objective-C runtime was released, and support was added in the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). With a Free, portable implementation available, Objective-C became a more attractive language for developers, but was still overshadowed by C++, which was actively pushed by Microsoft.