As sort of follow-up-in-spirit to my older post I decided to share a really straight forward way to use Objective-C to build GTK+ applications.
Objective-what?
Objective-C is an improvement to the iconic C programming language that remains backwards compatible while adding many new and interesting features. Chief among these additions is syntax for real objects (and thus object-oriented programming). Popularized by NeXT and eventually Apple, Objective-C is most commonly seen in development for Apple OSX and iOS based platforms.
When Ubuntu 10.04 was released it represented the most modern incarnation of Canonical’s premier Linux desktop distribution. However not all things were better in this release. For myself I immediately noticed a problem while trying to install the gnustep-devel development libraries for GNUstep and Objective-C. I was greeted with this oh so lovely error message:
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming.
For my iPhone Application Programming course I have become quite accustomed to using Objective-C; mostly because Apple strongly recommends requires that you write all of your code in it. Let me just begin by saying that Objective-C can be one of the most confusing and, at least at first glance, poorly designed programming languages that I have come across. Rather than using the standard C-like syntax of instance.method Objective-C uses a message passing syntax which looks a little something like [instance method].