Why doesn't Objective-C support private methods?

Question

I've seen a number of strategies for declaring semi-private methods in Objective-C, but there does not seem to be a way to make a truly private method. I accept that. But, why is this so? Every explanation I've essentially says, "you can't do it, but here's a close approximation."

There are a number of keywords applied to ivars (members) that control their scope, e.g. @private, @public, @protected. Why can't this be done for methods as well? It seems like something the runtime should be able to support. Is there an underlying philosophy I'm missing? Is this deliberate?

EDIT: As a bit of follow-up. It seems that Objective-C is still evolving, and that Apple is pushing things forward and that there is a not insignificant desire within the Objective-C developer community for private methods.

EDIT: One of the assumptions I've noticed is that private messages would have to go through the runtime resulting in a potentially large overhead. Is this absolutely true? There would be no way for a private method to short-circuit this check or skip the runtime?

Answer 1

It's an issue with the runtime environment of Objective-C. While C/C++ compiles down into unreadable machine code, Objective-C still maintains some human-readable attributes like method names as strings. This gives Objective-C the ability to perform reflective features.

EDIT: Being a reflective language without strict private methods makes Objective-C more "pythonic" in that you trust other people that use your code rather than restrict what methods they can call. Using naming conventions like double underscores is meant to hide your code from a casual client coder, but won't stop coders needing to do more serious work.

Answer 2

The runtime could support it but the cost would be enormous. Every selector that is sent would need to be checked for whether it is private or public for that class, or each class would need to manage two separate dispatch tables. This isn't the same for instance variables because this level of protection is done at compile time.

Also, the runtime would need to verify that the sender of a private message is of the same class as the receiver. You could also bypass private methods; if the class used instanceMethodForSelector:, it could give the returned IMP to any other class for them to invoke the private method directly.

Private methods could not bypass the message dispatch. Consider the following scenario:

1. A class AllPublic has a public instance method doSomething

2. Another class HasPrivate has a private instance method also called doSomething

3. You create an array containing any number of instances of both AllPublic and HasPrivate

4. You have the following loop:

   for (id anObject in myArray)
       [anObject doSomething];
   

   If you ran that loop from within AllPublic, the runtime would have to stop you sending doSomething on the HasPrivate instances, however this loop would be usable if it was inside the HasPrivate class.

Answer 3

Essentially, it has to do with Objective-C's message-passing form of method calls. Any message can be sent to any object, and the object chooses how to respond to the message. Normally it will respond by executing the method named after the message, but it could respond in a number of other ways too. This doesn't make private methods completely impossible — Ruby does it with a similar message-passing system — but it does make them somewhat awkward.

Even Ruby's implementation of private methods is a bit confusing to people because of the strangeness (you can send the object any message you like, except for the ones on this list!). Essentially, Ruby makes it work by forbidding private methods to be called with an explicit receiver. In Objective-C it would require even more work since Objective-C doesn't have that option.

Answer 4

The answers posted thus far do a good job of answering the question from a philosophical perspective, so I'm going to posit a more pragmatic reason: what would be gained by changing the semantics of the language? It's simple enough to effectively "hide" private methods. By way of example, imagine you have a class declared in a header file, like so:

@interface MyObject : NSObject {}
- (void) doSomething;
@end

If you have a need for "private" methods, you can also put this in the implementation file:

@interface MyObject (Private)
- (void) doSomeHelperThing;
@end

@implementation MyObject

- (void) doSomething
{
    // Do some stuff
    [self doSomeHelperThing];
    // Do some other stuff;
}

- (void) doSomeHelperThing
{
    // Do some helper stuff
}

@end

Sure, it's not quite the same as C++/Java private methods, but it's effectively close enough, so why alter the semantics of the language, as well as the compiler, runtime, etc., to add a feature that's already emulated in an acceptable way? As noted in other answers, the message-passing semantics -- and their reliance on runtime reflection -- would make handling "private" messages non-trivial.

Answer 5

The answer is... well... simple. Simplicity and consistency, in fact.

Objective-C is purely dynamic at the moment of method dispatch. In particular, every method dispatch goes through the exact same dynamic method resolution point as every other method dispatch. At runtime, every method implementation has the exact same exposure and all of the APIs provided by the Objective-C runtime that work with methods and selectors work equally the same across all methods.

As many have answered (both here and in other questions), compile-time private methods are supported; if a class doesn't declare a method in its publicly available interface, then that method might as well not exist as far as your code is concerned. In other words, you can achieve all of the various combinations of visibility desired at compilation time by organizing your project appropriately.

There is little benefit to duplicating the same functionality into the runtime. It would add a tremendous amount of complexity and overhead. And even with all of that complexity, it still wouldn't prevent all but the most casual developer from executing your supposedly "private" methods.

EDIT: One of the assumptions I've noticed is that private messages would have to go through the runtime resulting in a potentially large overhead. Is this absolutely true? There would be no way for a private method to short-circuit this check or skip the runtime?

To do so, though, would undermine the pure dynamic nature of the language. No longer would every method dispatch go through an identical dispatch mechanism. Instead, you would be left in a situation where most methods behave one way and a small handful are just different.

This extends beyond the runtime as there are many mechanisms in Cocoa built on top of the consistent dynamism of Objective-C. For example, both Key Value Coding and Key Value Observation would either have to be very heavily modified to support private methods — most likely by creating an exploitable loophole — or private methods would be incompatible.

Answer 6

There are two answers depending on the interpretation of the question.

The first is by hiding the method implementation from the interface. This is used, typically with a category with no name (e.g. ‘@interface Foo()‘). This permits the object to send those messages but not others - though one might still override accidentally (or otherwise).

The second answer, on the assumption that this is about performance and inlining, is made possible but as a local C funtion instead. If you wanted a ‘private foo(NSString *arg)‘ method, you would do ‘void MyClass_foo(MyClass *self, NSString *arg)‘ and calll it as a C function like ‘MyClass_foo(self,arg)‘. The syntax is different, but it acts with the sane kind of performance characteristics of C++'s private methods.

Although this answers the question, I should point out that the no-name category is by far the more common Objective-C way of doing this.

Answer 7

Yes, it can be done without affecting the runtime by utilizing a technique already employed by the compiler(s) for handling C++: name-mangling.

It hasn't been done because it hasn't been established that it would solve some considerable difficulty in the coding problem space that other techniques (e.g., prefixing or underscoring) are able to circumvent sufficiently. IOW, you need more pain to overcome ingrained habits.

You could contribute patches to clang or gcc that add private methods to the syntax and generated mangled names that it alone recognized during compilation (and promptly forgot). Then others in the Objective-C community would be able to determine whether it was actually worthwhile or not. It's likely to be faster that way than trying to convince the developers.

Answer 8

The easiest solution is just to declare some static C functions in your Objective-C classes. These only have file scope as per the C rules for the static keyword and because of that they can only be used by methods in that class.

No fuss at all.