id and Obj-C was RE: Paradigms was [GD-General] Compile times/scripting/oop

[Brian H. <bri...@py...>]

> wasn't most of Id's early stuff written in Obj-C?

Only the tools.  DoomEd and QuakeEd were written in Obj-C, but the games
were pure ANSI C.  They didn't convert to C++ until Doom3, and I'm not
sure how that's going.

At some point QuakeEd got ported to C to run under Windows.  They had to
move to C because there was no OpenGL bindings available for Obj-C at
the time -- NeXT was busy pushing RenderMan as their graphics API.

Because John wanted/needed to start looking at hardware acceleration on
NT, he was pretty much left with no choice but to move to C in order to
use OpenGL under NT.  After the move was made, Obj-C was pretty much a
non-issue because NeXT ceased to be relevant (at the time of QuakeEd you
could still get OpenStep machines no x86 and PA-RISC).

The arrival of MacOS X and Cocoa hasn't changed anything, because I
believe most of their tools are now either commadline or integrated into
the engine itself.

Brian