Re: The Path of GNUstep (Was: Re: Gnustep + mac + windows? Possible?)

[Pete French]

> Except Linux is neither a clone of Unix, nor is it inferior to it.

Ummm, the inferiority one was a bad can of worms to open! Lets not
go there - pretend I said it in the past tense, back when it was a
lot younger.

But (as far as API goes) it is definitely a 'clone' - that was the entire
point of the original project. We were all using Minix, and one guy
on the mailing list was frutsrated with the speed, so set out to write
a new V7 clone (hand coded in assembler) which would be faster.

But had Linux at that point divereged and not decided to implement later
UNXI API's (such as socket(2) for example) it would have quickly gone
the way of the dodo. Dooesnt matter whether they were technically better (and
socket is an abomination of an API in a lot of ways) the point is that this
is what people wanted. In fact I suspect that there was no discussionon
the subject - people just went and implemented them because they wanted them.

> Portability ain't it. If cross-platform compatibility or a wider audience
> was important to them, they wouldn't be coding for OS X in the first
> place.

Very true. But does that mean that they wont take it if its there
for free - or at least with little effort? I also think that if its
incompatible it will hinder uptake from these people.

> Many of these people weren't OPENSTEP developers, they were NeXTstep
> developers. In the two years following the release of OPENSTEP, only a
> small fraction of NeXTstep apps were ever ported. Most just copied the 3.x
> frameworks over and kept going, because of compatibility.

Actually this occurred to me last night after I wrote the previous message.
You are completely right - there was never a big mass of OpenStep developers
out there, most of us continued to use NextStep. Indeed I tried (for 6 months)
and failed to convert our apps to OpenStep so we just stuck with NextStep.

-bat.