What are alternatives to Objective-C for Mac progr

Question

I've become very comfortable in the world of pointer-free, garbage-collected programming languages. Now I have to write a small Mac component. I've been learning Objective-C, but as I confront the possibility of dangling pointers and the need to manage retain counts, I feel disheartened.

I know that Objective-C now has garbage collection but this only works with Leopard. My component must work with Tiger, too.

I need to access some Cocoa libraries not available to Java, so that rules out my usual weapon of choice.

What are my alternatives? Especially with no explicit pointers and automatic garbage collection.

Answer 1

Also, FreePascal can generate native Carbon Apps (in progress working for Coccoa)

Answer 2

RubyCocoa is getting steadily more impressive, and I've seen lots of successful implementations using it. That is, of course, if Ruby's your cup of tea...

Answer 3

.NET via Mono mono-project.com

Answer 4

See NObjective (http://code.google.com/p/objcmapper/) bridge to Cocoa. It provides more features than others with less overheads.

Answer 5

You shouldn't be intimidated by Cocoa's retain/release reference counting. It's much, much easier in practice than GC fans would have you believe. The Cocoa memory management rules are dead simple, they only affect a tiny amount of your code, and even that code can be generated automagically.

Here's the trick. You encapsulate your MM code in accessor methods, and always use accessors. Xcode has built-in scripts to generate the appropriate accessors, or if you need more flexibility there are 3rd-part apps like Accessorizer.

This isn't an intrusive approach - you only need to worry about retaining an object if you're going to need to keep it for later use, and if you're going to do that you'll need an instance variable in which to keep it anyway. And, if you're using KVO and bindings, you'll need to use accessors to make sure the appropriate observer notifications are fired. Basically, if you're using good OOP and Cocoa practices, there's practically no additional thought or effort involved with memory management.

Most folks who have difficulty with Cocoa's "manual" memory management are doing so as a result of misusing it. The most common mistake is to scatter the relevant code all over the place. That means that a missing retain, extra release, etc will be difficult to find.

Answer 6

You can always use REALbasic (www.realsoftware.com). Real easy and fun to use, not free though. You can not make dylibs (or dll's) using it, but you can use dylibs and dll's in your code. And you can use cocoa libraries as well