Re: Cocoa/Windows parallel dvlpmt

[Tregaskis, Wade]

>> Apart from AppKit: Please give me some examples! Or are you just 
>> talking out of the blue?
>
>I think this is where the Cocoa fans are diverging from the GNUstep 
>fans.
>
>For me, AppKit is what makes Cocoa magic. I could care less about the 
>Cocoa containers--I am comfortable with STL and don't really get a kick 
>out of the cool features of, say, NSArray. For me, Cocoa without AppKit 
>is entirely uninteresting. I like Interface Builder, and "springy" 
>views, and dialog controls that "just work" like you expect, and 
>control-dragging around to make my own actions and outlets. AFAICS 
>GNUstep is not going to give me a comparable "ease-of-development" as 
>Cocoa/AppKit, or even half as easy.

Here, here.  This was in fact exactly my point - great, GnuStep offers a usable 
app foundation.  But it's not worth the bloat as compared to writing my own 
stuff, or using more lightweight alternatives (e.g. the STL, SDL/GDK/etc, etc). 
 As a Mac user for over a decade I can't stand to force my users to take off an 
afternoon from work just to install some libraries my app requires (let alone 
the app itself!).

It's all the stuff on top of that foundation that makes Cocoa great.  Including 
the development tools.  The GnuStep tools are [imho] ugly and unintuitive.  The 
PB replacement (named ProjectCenter, I believe) is in my experience very 
unstable, too.

[I should say, though, that for my current project on a Red Hat (9) box I'm 
using KWrite, because all the default Red Hat dev tools are too much of a pain 
or too unstable.  So perhaps I'm biased, or just very unlucky.]

>PS I could care less how CoreFoundation works under the covers. The 
>fact that GNUstep is in Objective-C from top to bottom is not a selling 
>point for me. If anything, it makes me think that Apple's 
>implementation will probably be a lot faster :) Objective-C is meant to 
>be easy to write, but I don't care how the guts of Cocoa are written; I 
>just want them to be fast and stable!

Exactly.  Apple's C-based CoreFoundation is an excellent way to drop down 
slightly from the message-passing overhead of ObjC, without losing all the 
benefits (e.g. polymorphism).  And the automatic bridging between the two 
levels is a godsend.

There's another point I must mention - an app compiled with GnuStep under Red 
Hat is an order of magnitude slower, in some areas, than one compiled using 
XCode.  The Gnu ObjC runtime appears to be very slow, contrary to what it's 
maintainers claim.  For the two projects I've considered using GnuStep for, the 
performance was simply too poor.  Since I consequently had to write [at the 
least] the core of both projects in C/C++, I decided to just use GTK for the UI 
anyway, and the STL of course for my containers & algorithms.  A much better 
solution, I've found.

Wade Tregaskis