I understand that most macOS app development occurs in ObjC and Swift, but I'm curious if C has a useful role in the Mac world outside of kernel-level programming.
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macOS Is serious macOS development occurring in plain old C?
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Yes, in various ways, but for application code it’s generally not the bulk of it though there may still be individual C source files in there. OpenGL shaders, OpenCL and Metal Shaders are basically written in C as well. It’s technically a separate language but it’s based on, I believe C99. Though remember that while it doesn’t change dramatically, C and C++ are still alive languages and do get evolved, even if it’s not like a full modernization at least for standard C.
But yeah you might fairly often find an algorithm in C that is called from another language. Swift is very good about C COmputability as well so you can fairly easily call a C function and such. There are also a lot of open source projects out there that you can use as dependencies that will have C codee
It’s a good language to have some familiarity with though not necessarily expertise. I doubt there’s much in user land written solely in C, but C interop is prevalent.
But yeah you might fairly often find an algorithm in C that is called from another language. Swift is very good about C COmputability as well so you can fairly easily call a C function and such. There are also a lot of open source projects out there that you can use as dependencies that will have C codee
It’s a good language to have some familiarity with though not necessarily expertise. I doubt there’s much in user land written solely in C, but C interop is prevalent.
Pretty much all of the base command line utilities and libraries that Apple imports from GNU and the BSDs are written in plain C. Not sure if that counts for your question as technically most of that stuff is developed outside of Apple and imported, but Apple devs do get involved with some of it.
A lot of the tools are Apple specific forks, yeah. Usually not super modified but a bit and of course general improvements and fixes get pushed upstream.
A Mac application typically has a rich and complex Graphical User Interface. GUIs are programmed with object-oriented programming with the Cocoa framework using Swift or Objective C. Cocoa is so complete that many applications can probably be programmed with Cocoa only but many things you might want to do aren't part of Cocoa and would be programmed with C. Objective C is a superset of C that allow you to use it as an object-oriented language so a lot of the code encapsulated in your Objective C code is C. The additions that Objective C adds to C are pretty simple and if you are a C programmer you can probably learn them in a few hours. But no, you can't program Cocoa with C, only Objective C.
Applications like Retroarch and Kodi are written largely in C++ with some Objective-C thrown in to bridge the gap to native Apple APIs.
I'd think the bigger question though would be "is serious development occurring in plain old c?" and for that, I'd have to say yes... but a lot is also in C++
I'd think the bigger question though would be "is serious development occurring in plain old c?" and for that, I'd have to say yes... but a lot is also in C++