Like [] and @ all over the place, C lack of safety, and manual memory management...

saagarjha · 2025-12-08T10:20:20 1765189220

Uh, the entire runtime?

jeberle · 2025-12-08T18:32:52 1765218772

I would look to the UCSD p-System as a precedent to the JVM. Both are byte-code interpreted VMs. Gosling used the p-system earlier in his career, prior to joining Sun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling#Career_and_contr...

The Objective-C runtime is very small: just enough to do late-bound fn calls to a tree of class defs. All on top of C.

pjmlp · 2025-12-08T12:14:00 1765196040

I beg to differ, given the engineering effort that went into JVM across various Java vendors, versus Apple and NeXT have done.

Proven by the fact that Swift had to be invented, as there was nothing left to fix Objective-C in a proper way.

saagarjha · 2025-12-08T13:23:57 1765200237

Swift has that runtime, by the way.

pjmlp · 2025-12-08T15:43:40 1765208620

Nope, Swift interops with Objective-C runtime to ease code migration from legacy Objective-C code, and existing Apple frameworks predating Swift.

A runtime that isn't part of the cross-platform Swift project, with missing functionality being rewriten into Swift.

saagarjha · 2025-12-10T10:01:34 1765360894

Yes, and those platforms are worse off for it.