Re: Cocoa/Windows parallel dvlpmt

[Andreas Hoeschler]

> > > Mac developers have no need to contribute to GNUstep. We have a 
> > > better version already.
> >
> > Better? Foundation is sometimes very (!) annoying because of its 
> > CoreFoundation! Try e.g. to write a transparent persistence layer. 
> > Modestly said: very, very ugly.
> > Or all those (void*) as instance variables. Impossible to handle. So 
> > on the one hand, you have a beautiful language like ObjC with a lot 
> > of runtime information and on the other hand you have Apple's 
> > Foundation implementation.
> > Distributed Objects are also better in GNUstep.
> > And if you have a problem, you debug lightning faster in GNUstep, 
> > because you trace through the source of "Foundation". Actually the 
> > only things, that are better on MOSX are AppKit and Xcode.

Yes!

> Come on. If you seriously think that most people would rather work 
> with GNUstep than Cocoa, you are just deluding yourself.
>
> I'm glad you like it, and it's a valuable thing to work on. But it's 
> nowhere near as complete or robust as the real thing.

Yes!

Both is true IMHO.

• We know OPENSTEP/Cocoa/GNUstep is super well designed.
• We love Objective-C
• GNUstep base can be used for cross platform development
• GNUstep gui cannot be used out of the box for cross platform 
development, at least not for non-trial applications, simply because 
some things do not work as intended yet (e.g. comboboxes in 
tablecolumns)

So what now?

I doubt that it's more cost effective to develop a frontent with native 
API for each platform you want to support. I think prototyping on Cocoa 
and then trying to port to GNUstep and thereby implementing or fixing 
the stuff that is missing is the better and in the long term more 
cost-effective approach, at least if you go for Mac, Linux, Solaris,... 
I can't comment on Windows since I haven't tried out GNUstep for 
Windows yet.

Regards,

    Andreas