Objective-C was a modification of the GCC developed by NeXT. NeXT didn't publicly release their patches and the FSF/GNU threatened legal action. NeXT released their sources and the GCC now supports Obj-C.
> Objective-C was a modification of the GCC developed by NeXT.
No.
Objective-C was developed in the early '80s (as a C pre-processor, as the Grandparent post said) by Brad Cox, and commercialized by himself and Tom Love via a company they created together called Stepstone. Cox wrote a book about their product, Object Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach, in 1986. I own a copy. It's pretty good!
Some time later, NeXT decided to build their user-space APIs around Objective-C, and bought the rights to Objective-C from Stepstone outright. It was at that point that they started modifying GCC to directly compile Objective-C rather than pre-process it into C.
I have the book too. It's interesting as a history lesson and initial motivations for Objective-C.
In particular, in the beginning Objective-C was a lot looser typed at compile time than it is now: no NSString* or NSWindow*, it was all just id. It was an attempt to make C look like Smalltalk.
The language eventually evolved more toward the static-typed end of the spectrum, culminating in support for lightweight generics and ostensibly birthing Swift along the way.
> Objective-C was a modification of the GCC developed by NeXT.
No. Objective-C started out as a set of C Macros, then an actual pre-processor was created, mostly to deal with uniquing selectors. Once the pre-processor was there it was used to create actual syntax.
Documented in "Object Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach".[1] Still one of the best books on OO out there, because it treats OO as an architectural style with tradeoffs relative to other styles, rather than as a religion to be accepted (or nowadays as the devil to be cast into hell).
It also clearly describes the deliberate hybrid style that seems to be mostly forgotten now: object largely implemented in C, but connected via dynamic messaging. "Software-ICs".
I am somewhat surprised by seeing the 1986 release date, I guess I must have gotten it pretty soon after it was published. Used it as a template to implement an Objective-C pre-processor + runtime + basic classes on my Amiga (had just gotten a C compiler for it).
One of the reasons I got a NeXT was because NeXTStep was largely implemented in Objective-C, which to me meant they "got" it. And it also meant I could enjoy programming in Objective-C without having to maintain my own :-)
> No. Objective-C started out as a set of C Macros, then an actual pre-processor was created, mostly to deal with uniquing selectors. Once the pre-processor was there it was used to create actual syntax.
I'm curious. What did that early form of Obj-C look like?
> In order to circumvent the terms of the GPL, NeXT had originally intended to ship the Objective-C frontend separately, allowing the user to link it with GCC to produce the compiler executable. After being initially accepted by Richard M. Stallman, this plan was rejected after Stallman consulted with GNU's lawyers and NeXT agreed to make Objective-C part of GCC.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Leg...