> Objective-C was a modification of the GCC developed by NeXT.
No.
Objective-C was developed in the early '80s (as a C pre-processor, as the Grandparent post said) by Brad Cox, and commercialized by himself and Tom Love via a company they created together called Stepstone. Cox wrote a book about their product, Object Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach, in 1986. I own a copy. It's pretty good!
Some time later, NeXT decided to build their user-space APIs around Objective-C, and bought the rights to Objective-C from Stepstone outright. It was at that point that they started modifying GCC to directly compile Objective-C rather than pre-process it into C.
I have the book too. It's interesting as a history lesson and initial motivations for Objective-C.
In particular, in the beginning Objective-C was a lot looser typed at compile time than it is now: no NSString* or NSWindow*, it was all just id. It was an attempt to make C look like Smalltalk.
The language eventually evolved more toward the static-typed end of the spectrum, culminating in support for lightweight generics and ostensibly birthing Swift along the way.
No.
Objective-C was developed in the early '80s (as a C pre-processor, as the Grandparent post said) by Brad Cox, and commercialized by himself and Tom Love via a company they created together called Stepstone. Cox wrote a book about their product, Object Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach, in 1986. I own a copy. It's pretty good!
Some time later, NeXT decided to build their user-space APIs around Objective-C, and bought the rights to Objective-C from Stepstone outright. It was at that point that they started modifying GCC to directly compile Objective-C rather than pre-process it into C.