Re: Cocoa/Windows parallel dvlpmt

[Alex Perez]

> I don't know if you actually looked at the state of GNUStep on Windows 
> but it's absolutely unusable right now to port software.
This is a half-truth. GNUstep's -base (Foundation) is very stable under 
win32, and used in production environments. -GUI (AppKit) is another story 
entirely, but as Florent mentioned and as I will reinforce, this is under 
current, active development.
> 
> First, the Windows port is nearly impossible to compile properly 
> (instructions are outdated, etc). Second, it doesn't seem to use native 
> Windows controls -- instead, it insists on drawing everything by itself 
> in NextStep style. What you want from a port is something that looks 
> and behaves the way other apps does on the target platform.
There was a very lenghty discussion about this on the gnustep-discuss 
mailing list a month or two back. GNUstep will never draw native win32 
widgets under Windows. NeXT's OPENSTEP Enterprise for Windows and Apple's 
YellowBox did not either. They drew pseudo-windows-widgets. Run an OS4.2 
app under Windows XP with the Luna theme and you'll see what I'm talking 
about. What *IS* entirely possible is some sort of GTK-Wimp (Windows 
Impersonator) type-thing for GNUstep under Windows. GTK-Wimp is a GTK 
theme that draws native win32 widgets in place of the ugly GTKrap ones.
 
> While these goals may ultimately be achieved by the GNUStep project, it 
> seems to me that noone is really working on the Windows port right now. 
> This is too bad because it would make a wonderful porting base (a lot 
> of their code is mature).

I get real sick of people saying this. It's an open-source project! If 
you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Whiners 
really ought to either (A) keep their opinions to themselves, or (B) 
Contribute. I'm a GNUstep user and know there's active development on the 
win32 backend. The goal is "Stability First", so I think the old "put up 
or shut up" adage rings true here. If Mac developers spent half as much 
time contributing to GNUstep as they did whining about how much it sucked, 
it'd be a world-class product!

Alex Perez
Chief Instigator.