No, the kernel was written in C and based on the Mach kernel, though it is true
to say that most of the OS functions were exposed via Obj-C objects. Obj-C is
really like an MFC add-on for writing UI programs, but there was nothing to stop
you from writing std C. What was REALLY cool about the NeXT machines was that
it had an on-board Motorola DSP that you could throw number crunching programs
at that ran synchronously with the main 68k processor, an entry-level
multiprocessing capability. Of couse, that capability was lost when it was
ported to x86.
Some of the remnants of NeXTSTEP live on in the guise of Mac OS X.
Regards,
Paul Bunn, UltraBac Software, 425-644-6000
Microsoft MVP - WindowsNT/2000
http://www.ultrabac.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Jan Bottorff [mailto:xxxxx@pmatrix.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 5:11 PM
To: NT Developers Interest List
Subject: [ntdev] Re: 3rd party Device driver development tool or pure
wdm driver development…Which is the best???
Underlying OS was Mach. Language of choice - C
That doesn’t quite seem accurate. NeXT applications were written in
Objective-C, which was a simple dynamically bound OOP extension. I was
never a NeXT developer, but my understanding was the whole user mode
application universe (NeXTStep) was done in Objective-C, and the system
API’s were all defined in terms of Objective-C objects and messages.
Using Objective-C is a TOTALLY different environment that straight C. This
was an attempt to have some of the dynamic flexibility of Smalltalk and the
execution speed of C.
Objective-C I believe is still part of the GNU compiler.
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