March 2, 2026
Square brackets, sharp elbows
Why Objective-C
Old-school brackets are back: Dev’s love letter sparks nostalgia, safety wars, and speed flexes
TLDR: A veteran dev sprinted back to Objective‑C to build a lightning‑fast blog tool, and the internet lit up. Fans cheered the speed and simplicity, safety diehards warned “no Optionals, no peace,” and pragmatists argued about C++ glue—turning one tiny tool into a big debate over speed, safety, and sanity.
Plot twist: the same engineer who gleefully nuked tons of Objective-C at a big audiobook company just rebuilt his blog tool in it—and loved every minute. His new open-source app, SalmonBay, blasts through a full site rebuild in under a second, and that performance brag sent the comments into maximum spice mode.
The nostalgia squad swooned. One fan called today’s Swift landscape “Swift craziness” and sighed, “I really miss Objective-C,” even name-dropping the classic “Second System Syndrome” (the sequel that gets bloated) as a jab at Apple’s newer choices. Tool-heads jumped in with tips like ObjFW, a cross-platform toolkit to take those old-school vibes on the road.
But the safety crew slammed the brakes: “I will never go back to chasing null pointer crashes,” said one dev, praising modern “Optionals” (think: built-in warnings when data might be missing) as the non-negotiable seatbelt they refuse to unbuckle. Meanwhile, the pragmatists praised Objective-C++ for gluing C++ libraries into Mac apps, grumbling that Swift’s bridge still feels clunky.
And then came the memes: someone defended those weird square brackets as “little ASCII envelopes” that “send messages.” Add the author’s own “loaded footgun” joke and it’s a full-on retro roast. Verdict? Speed vs. safety vs. vibes—and everyone’s loudly right.
Key Points
- •The author rebuilt a static site/blog generator as a fast command-line app, targeting sub‑one‑second full renders.
- •After abandoning a Python attempt, he evaluated Swift, Rust, Go, and C, prioritizing performance.
- •He chose Objective‑C for being C with more convenient features, while retaining high performance.
- •He highlights Objective‑C’s small, stable design and manageable tech debt despite its pitfalls.
- •The resulting tool, SalmonBay, is open-sourced on Codeberg and clean-builds the long-running blog in under one second.