Jesper writes about 10.5 Leopard’s Cocoa bridges for Ruby and Python, and why they’re more useful than .NET’s similar support for many languages. In a nutshell, whereas in .NET, everything ultimately compiles to CIL, thus taking away any performance benefits one particular language may have had, Cocoa leaves your code in the very language it’s been written; there is no bytecode. In addition, while .NET’s CIL requirement ultimately means that all .NET languages try to be as C#-like in their features as possible, Cocoa languages such as Ruby can play out their own particular strengths.
I for one am still not sold, however, that Apple is giving up on the bytecode concept completely, especially with regard to Apple’s mysterious LLVM involvement. I can’t wait to hear more gossip on that one.
Others' Thoughts
Comment on February 14th, 2007 at 9:38 pm
A note: Apple using LLVM in the future doesn’t necessarily mean “bytecode or bust” for the new languages. LLVM currently works with GCC, and what’s compiled with GCC? Objective-C. Perl or Python or Ruby or what have you are all interpreted languages, or at least compiled on the fly.
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