Live from the Roasterie: Did this, in any important sense, matter for Apple's ability to resist the Android onslaught in mobile more successfully than it resisted the Windows onslaught on the desktop?
: Craig Federighi on Swift: "With the advent of mobile, suddenly the processors that mattered were dramatically slower...
...And, in a bit of an upset, it turned out that Apple’s reliance on the relatively ancient Objective-C — a language that required a programmer to manage memory on their own — meant that iOS apps could be more performant whille needing fewer resources relative to Android ones (which include memory management, aka garbage collection, and are further abstracted by running on a virtual machine; this is why Android apps are easily ported to Intel, while iOS apps would take significantly more work). Still, this doesn’t change the fact that Objective-C is a fundamentally ‘unsafe’ language, something that is problematic not only when it comes to getting new developers on your platform, but also when it comes to building anything that must be as bug free as possible (like, say, a car)...
