Objectionable C
by John on Jan.04, 2010, under Main Stuff
As if I didn’t have enough projects, I decided to try my hand at working with XCode and Mac development in general again. The good news is that, by and large, Core Data makes file manipulation and data storage much easier.
The bad news is that it’s still all in Objective-C and, if anything, the people who developed that abomination of a language have only managed to become more cynical and sadistic in the intervening year or so.
It’s for my own good… It’s knowledge and self-training… it’s a new language and resume fodder……..
…it’s time to go shoot some zombies until I feel better.
3 comments for this entry:
January 5th, 2010 on 7:20 pm
If I remember right DOOM was programmed in Objective-C.
January 5th, 2010 on 8:26 pm
I was curious about that… the first version of the Doom engine was programmed on NeXT machines (which were where Obj-C debuted) but it was later ported to straight-up C when time came for the DOS release.
Hm. Imagine how much different things would have been if the DOS release had been infeasible. I certainly wouldn’t have minded a NeXTBox back in the day…
January 8th, 2010 on 11:18 pm
I’m not going to comment further when I don’t know for sure, but I remember hearing it was in Objective-C and that it was written to be “portable” – i.e. just compile it for each environment other than little interface things on the front end (for example, Dave Taylor, later of crack dot com, did the “official” unix/linux porting of the day).
Bruce Lewis, who developed GLDoom later on, pointed out that the code WAS very portable and designed to be easy to recompile in a variety of environments, but that he’d had to sort of rearrange some of it because while it had been designed to be portable, it hadn’t been designed with the idea of multiple renderers in mind, so he ended up rearranging some renderer code out from being “in” the other code to being elsewhere in order to be able to have different rendering modules that would apply across the game. (I’m explicating incredibly brief comments I’m half-remembering to their logical conclusion.)