> GIMP development started in 1995. The GNU Objective C frontend (the one that has stayed in use) started in 1993. I would hardly consider the GIMP developers (who became the early developers of GTK) to be rash in their option not to adopt a language that had only been available for a couple of years in the open source world.
Early in 1997, Guillaume Laurent and I spent some time looking into Objective C as a possible language for the "next version" of the Rosegarden sequencer on Unix/X11. At the time Rosegarden was a C application[1] using Athena widgets with my own little styling library, and we were sure there must be better options and were prepared to rewrite the UI entirely if we had to.
We ended up ruling it out for a few reasons, which I've just looked up in old email archives. I had some trouble getting the then-new gcc Objective C runtime working across Unix systems (we didn't only target Linux) and feared that we wouldn't be able to give our code to someone else and have them compile it easily. We couldn't find a working graphical toolkit: we thought GNUstep wasn't ready and also that it was probably going to be overkill. Other possibilities like NSXKit[2] weren't there either. Guillaume experimented with writing a toolkit himself but quickly ran into various obstacles that I don't have a record of.
(What is striking in hindsight is how hard it was to find reliable information to help us make a decision like this. There was documentation, and there were opinions, but there was very little of the form "we used this for our project and here's how it worked" that you would begin to see after blogging had become commonplace. We worked mostly on supposition and projection - install something, see if we could get it to build at all, spend a couple of hours with it and make guesses based on that, as well as on external info such as how much we knew about the developers that worked on it.)
So we switched to C++ instead. Considered Qt, argued about it, looked at LessTif, then GTK, then contributed a bit to gtkmm, then after a couple of years of nominally using gtkmm and getting nothing done, we switched to Qt after all and were happy. Happy-ish.
Even for people who really liked Objective C in 1997, it was pretty hard to make a case for. Maybe an open source company with staff and capital could have, but they barely existed.
Early in 1997, Guillaume Laurent and I spent some time looking into Objective C as a possible language for the "next version" of the Rosegarden sequencer on Unix/X11. At the time Rosegarden was a C application[1] using Athena widgets with my own little styling library, and we were sure there must be better options and were prepared to rewrite the UI entirely if we had to.
We ended up ruling it out for a few reasons, which I've just looked up in old email archives. I had some trouble getting the then-new gcc Objective C runtime working across Unix systems (we didn't only target Linux) and feared that we wouldn't be able to give our code to someone else and have them compile it easily. We couldn't find a working graphical toolkit: we thought GNUstep wasn't ready and also that it was probably going to be overkill. Other possibilities like NSXKit[2] weren't there either. Guillaume experimented with writing a toolkit himself but quickly ran into various obstacles that I don't have a record of.
(What is striking in hindsight is how hard it was to find reliable information to help us make a decision like this. There was documentation, and there were opinions, but there was very little of the form "we used this for our project and here's how it worked" that you would begin to see after blogging had become commonplace. We worked mostly on supposition and projection - install something, see if we could get it to build at all, spend a couple of hours with it and make guesses based on that, as well as on external info such as how much we knew about the developers that worked on it.)
So we switched to C++ instead. Considered Qt, argued about it, looked at LessTif, then GTK, then contributed a bit to gtkmm, then after a couple of years of nominally using gtkmm and getting nothing done, we switched to Qt after all and were happy. Happy-ish.
Even for people who really liked Objective C in 1997, it was pretty hard to make a case for. Maybe an open source company with staff and capital could have, but they barely existed.
[1] https://all-day-breakfast.com/cannam/x11-rosegarden/rosegard...
[2] http://www.hardcoreprocessing.com/home/anoq/Programming/GNUS...