Skip to Content
iOS 15 Programming Fundamentals with Swift
book

iOS 15 Programming Fundamentals with Swift

by Matt Neuburg
October 2021
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
786 pages
21h 17m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Book available
Content preview from iOS 15 Programming Fundamentals with Swift

Appendix. C, Objective-C, and Swift

The APIs for Cocoa and its associated frameworks are written in Objective-C or its underlying base language, C. Messages that you send to Cocoa using Swift are being translated for you into Objective-C. Objects that you send and receive back and forth across the Swift/Objective-C bridge are Objective-C objects. Some objects that you send from Swift to Objective-C are even being translated for you into other object types, or into nonobject types.

This appendix summarizes the relevant linguistic features of C and Objective-C, and describes how Swift interfaces with those features. I do not explain here how to write Objective-C! For example, I’ll talk about Objective-C methods and method declarations, because you need to know how to call an Objective-C method from Swift; but I’m not going to explain how to call an Objective-C method using Objective-C.

The C Language

C provides the linguistic underpinnings of Objective-C. Objective-C is a superset of C; everything that is true of C is true also of Objective-C. It is possible, and often necessary, to write long stretches of Objective-C code that are, in effect, pure C. Some of the Cocoa APIs are written in C. Therefore, in order to know about Objective-C, it is necessary to know about C.

The C language was evolved during the early 1970s at Bell Labs in conjunction with the creation of Unix. The reference manual, The C Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, was published in 1978, and ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

iOS 15 Programming for Beginners - Sixth Edition

iOS 15 Programming for Beginners - Sixth Edition

Ahmad Sahar, Craig Clayton
Programming iOS 14

Programming iOS 14

Matt Neuburg

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781098118495Supplemental ContentErrata Page