title: Windows development using Objective-C
body: <p>Having recently read up a on Objective-C it strikes me as a fairly neat language with plenty of cool features.</p>
  
  <p>I have no intention of doing any iPhone development, however I understand that GCC is able to compile Objective-C code and so I wanted to know - <strong>Is Objective-C a viable alternative language to C99 for Windows development?</strong></p>
  
  <p>In particular:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Is anyone currently doing Windows development using Objective-C?</li>
  <li>Are there any runtime components that would need to be distributed with my applications?</li>
  <li>I understand that Objective-C is a superset of C, does this mean that it is possible to use any C-compatible library? (for example the Windows API)</li>
  <li>Would I get garbage collection in my applications?</li>
  <li>I've found <a href="http://www.cocotron.org/" rel="noreferrer">Cocotron</a> and <a href="http://www.gnustep.org/" rel="noreferrer">GNUstep</a> which are often mentioned when talking about using Objective-C on other platforms, however as GCC can already be used to compile Objective-C I don't really understand why I would need these.</li>
  <li>Are there any other pitfalls or traps I might run in attempting Windows development using Objective-C?</li>
  </ul>