[Openmcl-devel] OpenMCL and GnuStep

[Gary Byers]

On Sat, 9 Oct 2004, alex crain wrote:

>
> Is anyone using OpenMCL under GnuStep?
>

Some of the GNUStep stuff in objc-runtime is incomplete and/or wrong,
so I don't think that anyone doing '(require "COCOA")' under
Linux/GNUStep would get very far.

I think that at one point (before the CLOS/ObjC stuff), the level
of runtime support was nearly the same.

It's harder to fool GNUStep into using a different bundle path than
it is to fool Cocoa into doing so; I never tested any of the GUI
stuff under GNUStep.

(GNUstep also uses its own alternative to .nib files; there are tools
that try to automatically translate .nib files into .gmodel files,
but the results may need some tweaking.)

> I have no idea how compatible GnuStep is with COCOA/NextStep
> and I'm wondering if the COCOA interface is portable or
> is it really more of an OS X interface.

Since it's only ever run under OS X, it's clearly not very portable;
in theory, GNUStep's implementation of the AppKit and Foundation classes
is pretty close to the documented behavior of a large subset of Cocoa.
I imagine that, in practice, there'd be some deviation in behavior and
that (if the GNUStep runtime was up to data and the bundling/.nib issues
were solved) there'd be some wrestling involved.

In short: at this point, I wouldn't worry about "GNUStep compatibility",
since that's still just a theoretical issue.  I think that -most- of the
stuff that the IDE wants to do (subclass the text classes and integrate
them with Hemlock, use some other view classes, handle events in our
views) are supposed to be pretty portable and will probably prove to
be pretty portable, but we won't know for sure until we get to that point.

>
> :alex
>
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