I always got a "stay on the golden path and away from ObjC++" vibe from ObjC++, kind of like trying to ask Rails to do database stuff without using ActiveRecord in 2008.
You can easily write C++ code without having to bridge ObjC's object system to C++'s object-and-generics system: provide a simple C API to your C++ libraries.
But the other thing is, one reason to do ObjC at all is to avoid all the heartache that comes bundled with C++.
Obj-C++ is working well for me so far and the STL is much better than Obj-C's awkward and slow collection classes for anything that needs to run fast or that requires significant algorithmic complexity.
One of the nice things about going back from Ruby to a C language is, it's hard to think of anything you could do in the C language that would be as non-performant as Ruby. As slow as ObjC's collections are, they're faster than Ruby's.
Yeah, and they're fast enough for a lot of things, but I'm doing DSP at 44.1k/sec and even C++ virtual functions are too slow for that. But I can use an STL vector at no penalty over a native array.
It is just a shame that in some areas Objective-C is still lacking compared with more modern languages:
- a proper module system;
- reliance on the primitive #import/#include which slows down compilation
- no namespacing, relying instead on conventions to avoid clashes
