libobjc2

> Apple being the largest sponsor of Objective-C would suggest that you get greater vendor lock-in out of it than Swift Fun fact, you can use Objective-C on non-Apple platforms [1] and with Cocoa APIs courtesy of the GNUstep project [2]. [1] https://github.com/gnustep/libobjc2 [2] https://www.gnustep.org/

It's a shame that Objective-C never really caught on outside of the NeXT/Apple ecosystem. User interfaces benefit greatly from dynamism, and all the UI toolkits I've used for C and C++ try to emulate message passing in one way or another: from WinAPI's SendMessage, to GTK and Qt's signals and slots. I'm surprised the wider FOSS community didn't adopt the language. I've been building a GTK4 app recently, and the macro-heavy class boilerplate, C-style casting everywhere, and custom signaling mechanisms would all be far cleaner in Objective-C. It's easy to imagine glib and GTK as what could have been a FOSS parallel to Core Foundation and Cocoa. If you like C, then Objective-C is definitely worth a look. You don't need a Mac to try it either [1]. [1] https://github.com/gnustep/libobjc2

> Question: is Objective-C post 2.0 being actively maintained outside of Apple? Yes as part of the GNUStep project [1]. You can compile Objective-C with Clang for any platform, including Windows, and link with the GNUStep Obj-C runtime. The big problem is outside of GNUStep and macOS you won't have any frameworks - not even NSString. > I loved Objective-C very much (yes, really) and I'd like to continue using it after Apple phases it out You're not alone. Unlike C++, Obj-C was a reasonable OO extension to C. It's a shame the language never received more love. [1] https://github.com/gnustep/libobjc2

GNUstep being LGPL has as much adverse impact on developers as Apple's implementation being proprietary. (I.e., none.) It's the _LGPL_ after all, not the GPL. GNUstep has also moved to GitHub and seems to favor the the MIT license nowadays where possible (e.g., libobjc2)[1][2]. 1. https://github.com/gnustep/libobjc2 2. http://etoileos.com/dev/licensing/

Including libobjc2, which is a substantial improvement over the old GNU implementation. And it's MIT licensed! https://github.com/gnustep/libobjc2

> Leaning on the Objective-C runtime feels like a temporary solution because it only exists on the Mac and iOS. That's not entirely true; libobjc2[0] exists, for example, and is fully compatible with objc4. [0]: https://github.com/gnustep/libobjc2