Objective-C

Chapter 19. Using Objective-C on Other Platforms

In This Chapter

• Using Objective-C on Windows, Linux, and other platforms

• Understanding Objective-C framework maturity

• Working with Other Libraries

Although by far the best platforms for coding Objective-C are the ones that come from Apple, they are, by no means, exclusive. Objective-C has quite an extensive history on other platforms such as Linux, BSD, and even Windows. Depending upon your exact needs, you'll find that there are open source communities that support these alternative platforms quite well. In this chapter, I'd like to give you a brief introduction to some of these other platforms and tell you where you can find more information about them.

The biggest challenge when looking at Objective-C on other platforms is in the support of the frameworks that make Objective-C powerful. Porting the actual Objective-C language is a reasonably trivial affair. Since the GNU compiler collection (gcc) began including support for Objective-C, it has become available on virtually all of the platforms that gcc supports. However, porting the core frameworks is a much more daunting task.

To be sure, the Foundation framework has the greatest cross-platform support. Since I have focused almost exclusively on the foundation framework in this book, that means that any of the examples in this book should, with a few exceptions, compile and run on any of these other platforms.

When it comes to Cocoa and some of the other higher-level frameworks, they ...