Folks talk about xv in the past tense. I still use it. On AWS it is still a great way for me to view images on headless ECS instances using an X11 server on my Mac. I still use on my local Linux boxes because it has image editing features I still can not find elsewhere.
This is one of those posts I would like look back on in a year or two. I am usually a late adopter with everything. This time is think its different. I am seeing what AI can do with my own eyes. I am creating new things at light speed and figuring out this all works. I don't think you want to be late to the party on this one.
I still find Objective-C++ useful for writing MacOS apps that make heavy use of C++ libraries (e.g.; Eigen, OpenCV). The caveat is I have done a lot of Objective-C programming and Swift is still not as seamless as I would like bridging with modern C++ and the the STL.
I've been playing around with low-level Metal a bunch lately, any many of their docs and samples seem still be mostly in Objective-C/C++ and not Swift, so have been forcing myself to get into it.
At first I had the usual revulsion to the syntax, but after a few days getting used to it, I actually don't mind it at all now. (I still wouldn't say it's "elegant", but I can live with it).
Being Metal shader code is basically C++ anyway, and C++ is a language I'm familiar with, having a couple of .mm files to hold the Objective-C++ for API bridging and working in regular .cpp (and .h) files for the rest is pretty straight forward compared to having to learn Swift. (Especially with all the complaints I've heard about its complexity, including from Chris Lattner himself lately, which aligns with some of the other comments here).
Though to be fair, "Swift seems overly complex so use C++ instead" seems like a tough argument to make with a straight face ;-p
Metal is the last Mac OS framework that was fully done in Objective-C, however contrary to Microsoft, at least Apple does provide first class bindings to Swift.
To this day, .NET is not welcomed on the Windows division, and they rather go out of their way producing stuff like WinRT/UWP with the outcome we all know.
Yeah, Objective-C++ is surprisingly great. It sounds like a terrible idea, but the bridging works pretty much seamlessly, and Obj-C and C++ don't actually overlap all that much so they don't step on each other's toes. Each language has strengths that shore up the weak spots in the other.
+1 to Objective-C++. It makes for some surprisingly clean, compact code, best of both worlds, really. And the bridging between ARC and CF types is really quite magical, more languages should have that ability to be expressed in an older language without stripping everything out.
I just wish there were Objective-C bindings for more CF classes without having to mess with C.
I have my suspicion that it is still used heavily inside Apple. It especially caters to programmers that are control freaks like me -- you are a little closer to the metal (pun intended).
It's not difficult to determine where different languages are used – you can run `symbols -noDemangling BINARY | grep _Z`, where BINARY is a path to any binary, and see how many symbols use Itanium C++ name mangling. You'll see it sprinkled in enough places to get an idea of which parts of the system use it more than others.
Of course, parts of the Objective-C runtime are written in Objective-C++, so someone more pedantic than I might claim that fact alone counts as it being "used heavily."
Been using Perl since the beginning… essentially every time I needed to write a shell script more than 10 lines long I used Perl … eventually was also using it for web back end stuff too … kind of like duct tape. I still use it today if I need to write more than 10 lines of a bash script.
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