ObjectivEClipse project closing doors

[Alex Blewitt]

I posted a slightly longer explanation to my blog [1] about this decision, but I think it's time to wind down the ObjectivEClipse project. Unfortunately, we really didn't get the momentum up in order to start becoming competitive in the IDE space for Objective-C; and although the goal was to challenge Xcode as a development platform, IDE favouritism is prevalent just as much in the Objective-C world as it is in the Java world.

I'd like to thank Ryan for his help in getting the parser to where it is today; in particular, it's the first support that CDT has for parsing the blocks constructs [2]. However, the CDT parsers and internals have undergone significant refactoring since the CDT 6.0 release (upon which ObjectivEClipse was based) and it is impractical to try and fold this support back into ObjectivEClipse. So when CDT is released with the rest of the HElios release train later this month, ObjectivEClipse will not be compatible, and there's no plans to make it so.

I had hoped that having Objective-C support would make it easier for non-Mac platforms to develop Objective-C code - particularly since the gcc base supports objective-c out of the box on Linux (and, through MinGW and Cygwin, on Windows as well). One of the problems, perhaps, was that the feature wouldn't install on non-Mac platforms [3,4].

Max Berger [5] made a clone of my Git repository and made some changes to make it work for Linux, which I have since applied and made available in the Google Code repository. I have re-cut a version of the update site (ObjectivEClipse 0.3.0) [6] which removes all of the platform-specific restrictions that were preventing the feature from being installed on non-OSX systems - though I have not been able to personally verify the Linux support as the VirtualBox I have refuses to boot Ubuntu.

However, the experiment of getting Objective-C support onto CDT has effectively run its course. I don't believe that it will be easy (or practical) to update to the latest parser changes - meaning we're pinned on CDT 6.0 - and short of forking the whole CDT parser mechanism, I don't think we're in a winnable position. The only way we'll get Objective-C support in Eclipse will be if it happens at the upstream CDT project itself.

Thanks for your interest in and support of ObjectivEClipse, and happy Objective-C coding in some other tool in the future.

Alex

[1] http://alblue.bandlem.com/2010/06/objectiveclipse-project-closing-doors.html
[2] http://clang.llvm.org/docs/BlockLanguageSpec.txt
[3] http://code.google.com/p/objectiveclipse/issues/detail?id=47
[4] http://code.google.com/p/objectiveclipse/issues/detail?id=32
[5] http://github.com/maxberger/objectiveclipse
[6] http://code.google.com/p/objectiveclipse/source/detail?r=151

[Felix Holmgren]

Thanks for the effort!

/F

2010/6/2 Alex Blewitt <alex.b...@gmail.com>: