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Objective-C is just, like, a leaky abstraction over C

Recently I came across this 10 year old post by Robert Atkins: Objective C is like Jimi Hendrix . It is about reconciling admiration for Obj...

So if you'e new to Objective-C and, as I am, struggling to come to terms with the fact that it's one great big leaky abstraction on top of C, put yourself in the shoes of an 80s C programmer and remember you get to use these neat "modern" features in a systems programming language. So much so, that in the Apple developer ecosystem, the much larger C part started to be regarded as a completely separate language that most devs never dared touch. But Smalltalk requires a fairly large VM to run, typically coded in C or in Squeak's case, C plus BCPL-encoded-in-Smalltalk that gets automatically translated to C. Objective-C and Objective-Assembler showed that you don't actually need all that, just a tiny messaging function on top of bare machine is not just sufficient, it's also faster, integrates better and is easier to implement.

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