Also, can you assume that apps that even are in the Apple domain DO use Objective-C enough that it warrants calling the language "popular"? Or are we seeing apps written in another language with a bit of Objective-C to act as glue between the app and Cocoa/iOS?
I'm just looking at the slew of cross-platform games (eg. the GTA series) that have recently been put on the iDevices and thinking "They wouldn't have rewritten those from scratch, would they?".
> They wouldn't have rewritten those from scratch, would they?
I do a lot of cross-platform integration. This is based on my experience. If you know you're going to cover multiple platforms from the beginning, you will do a lot of things to make that a lot easier.
Most of those would be written to target a graphics framework (like OpenGL) for the visual elements. Then, for each platform there will be a host that OS-specific things like file & network access. You can also use libraries to abstract that for you.
So the amount that needs to be rewritten depends on how similar the new platform is to the old ones. Going from PC to iOS would be about 40%. Going to Nintendo Wii, maybe 70%.
Unless the platform is particularly unusual, most of the hard problems were solved in the first release, adding additional platforms is fairly mechanical. So even if you need to replace >50% of the code, you know roughly how you're going to do it before you start.
