Objective-C is a general-purpose, high-level, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. It is the main programming language used by Apple for the OS X and iOS operating systems and their respective APIs, Cocoa and Cocoa Touch. Originally developed in the early 1980s, it was selected as the main language used by NeXT for its NeXTSTEP operating system, from which OS X and iOS are derived. Generic Objective-C programs that do not use these libraries can also be compiled for any system supported by GCC or Clang.
What is Objective-C?
Objective-C is a thin layer on top of C, and moreover is a strict superset of C; it is possible to compile any C program with an Objective-C compiler, and to freely include C code within an Objective-C class. The language derives its object syntax from Smalltalk. All of the syntax for non-object-oriented operations (including primitive variables, pre-processing, expressions, function declarations, and function calls) are identical to that of C, while the syntax for object-oriented features is an implementation of Smalltalk-style messaging. Objective-C implementations use a thin runtime system written in C, which adds little to the size of the application. In contrast, most object-oriented systems at the time that it was created used large virtual machine runtimes.
Objective-C development – also for you
Programs written in Objective-C tend to be not much larger than the size of their code and that of the libraries (which generally do not need to be included in the software distribution), in contrast to Smalltalk systems where a large amount of memory was used just to open a window. If you need Objective-C, contact us now. We'll do our very best to help you and show you the options available to you.