Objective-C

I have recently started looking into Objective-C. In my experience, one of the biggest hurdles when learning C++ is understanding who does what; textbooks focus on OO and spend a lot of time on discussing buiding classes and coming up with silly examples, and little is said about how does this translate into executable code. With C you still have a pretty good idea how the code becomes machine code. With C++ the connection is broken; a class does not map to registries and you are left with a major gap in the continuum. The same problem (even to a larger extent) occurs with SQL or VM-type languages such as C#, Java, or Actionscript.

The ObjC instructions from Apple are the only ones I have seen so far that do a good job at explaining the runtime, and how OO constructs become procedural code. I am very impressed.

I have a first attempt at writing Mac OS X code here, a Cocoa front end to Unix queues. IPCS seems to not work with queues on Mac, but other than that the system calls seem to work quite well.