Chapter 4. Foundation: The Objective-C Standard Library

The “core” Objective-C language only defines two classes: Object and Protocol. It is rare to use Objective-C without an implementation of OpenStep Foundation, whether it’s GNUstep, Cocoa, libfoundation, or Cocotron. The Portable Object Compiler provides its own set of core objects, but it is not widely used.

The OpenStep Foundation is the closest thing that Objective-C has to a standard library, the equivalent of the C standard library or C++’s STL. Of course since Objective-C is a pure superset of C, the C standard library can also be used. The original idea was to do exactly this, and use Objective-C for building components from C software.

Foundation was only introduced with OpenStep ...

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