What is the future of Objective-C?

Swift sucks. I’m slowly abandoning Apple because of it and Mac OS is starting to look like iOS. Apple is punishing developers who don’t conform to their crappy swift language.

a good example of suckiness. https://github.com/Flying-Toast/swift-sucks

Long story short, Swift is mostly about politics.

I became a Software Developer basically because of MacOS-X and Objective-C. I just love the syntax, yes it can become a mess sometimes with all the nested brackets but it is pretty unique. Apple has been known for shaving layers of products and technologies (PowerPC WebObjects Carbon ...) so I wouldn't be surprised but I will be really disappointed. With Carbon Apple initially announced MacOS X and Cocoa and never mentioned anything about getting rid of it but they eventually did.

Regarding Swift it has nice things but the syntax is kind of boring tbh. I always wondered why Apple went with a new syntax instead of modernize Objective-C get rid of some redundancy and add new things like lambdas and so on. My hypothesis is that the original generation of Apple/Next developers were displaced by the new people coming from the Windows and GNU world that got in after the success of the iPhone.

Swift & Objective-C are going to be around for some time yet, sometimes one is required to add @objc in swift when they isn't not one single line of Objective-C code.

Swift is good for the right App, tho in some types of Apps Swift is totally the wrong language and Objective-C, C or C++ is best. Swift can work with Objective-C, C & C++ and the four when used appropriately is the best course of action, never design your App in one Language , keep your options open.

Work in a big tech company "MAMMA" as is called today, can't tell which one due to and NDA, a LOT of our codebase still Objc and there is no plans to move a single line, so rest assure Objc will be very alive at least in big tech projects, now for startups or some other projects Swift is ramping up quickly, but I worked in another company that had Objc code base and eventually we started moving to Swift, but it was always a combination of both worlds. Objc still as powerful as C/C++ today.

Well Apple has pretty much dropped Objective-C and moved fully to Swift and SwiftUI becuase its faster and better to use. Worth learning it though.

Normally I avoid wading into threads like this but there have been two notable changes since this thread was created back in 2018:

• At WWDC 2022 Apple outlined its future directions. If you haven’t already done so, I recommend that you watch WWDC 2022 Session 102 Platforms State of the Union, and specifically Josh’s section starting at 3:43.
• Many new Apple frameworks are Swift only.

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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Well Apple has pretty much dropped Objective-C and moved fully to Swift and SwiftUI becuase its faster and better to use. Worth learning it though.

Interesting claims. When you say faster are you talking about performance or the speed in which you scratch your code?

While it's obvious Apple is recommending Swift all the new AppKit API I'm aware of (or at least care about) for macOS 26.0 is available to Objective-C and I'm grateful or that. And how do you define better to use? Do you think the compiler gives better/more descriptive warning/error fixes in Swift than Objective-C? What about viewing variables in the debugger? What about compiler speed?

I will continue to use Objective-C until I can't.

My policy is currently this: -Any Swift only frameworks that are required (like Storekit2) must be wrapped inside its own framework or library.

-All Swift code must be private API. All public API is Objective-C.

-Main project remains Objective-C and continues on like Swift doesn't exist.

Do I recommend this for new devs? No but that has more to do with Apple's public statements. It has nothing to do with Swift being "better" in any measurable way for me. I suspect one day that may change and I won't be able to use Objective-C anymore or I'll have to get an Objective-C runtime from GNUStep or something. Or maybe I'll just move to Electron or Flutter.