title: Is Objective C really compiled ? Isn't it more like Visual Basic / .NET runtime ? Then what prevents it to be portable to other platforms?
body: <p>Syntactically it's superset of C. But since messages are sent and processed at runtime this means it cannot be a pure compiled language like c but it needs a runtime like Visual Basic or .Net runtime.</p>
  
  <p>Then what prevents it to be portable to other platforms by transforming this runtime to something like .NET Framework or Java JVM ?</p>
  
  <p>Note: when I say VB it's of course last version 6 which compiles to Bytecode so why do you pretend that Java or .Net are different fundamentally from VB6 except for portability it's the same principle: see Similar to Java, Visual Basic is compiled into an intermediate language called "bytecode." The bytecode is translated into x86 machine language by the Visual Basic runtime module.</p>
  
  <p>Read more: <a href="http://www.answers.com/topic/visual-basic#ixzz19iJd3wjA" rel="noreferrer">http://www.answers.com/topic/visual-basic#ixzz19iJd3wjA</a></p>
  
  <p><strong>Similar to Java, Visual Basic is compiled into an intermediate language called "bytecode." The bytecode is translated into x86 machine language by the Visual Basic runtime module.</strong></p>