Re: Cocoa/Windows parallel dvlpmt

[Gregory John Casamento]

Wade,

--- "Tregaskis, Wade" <wjtregaskis@students.latrobe.edu.au> wrote:
> >> 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!).

I guarantee that you've installed libs to get apps working after your initial
installation.  Deny it and I'll believe that you're lying as it's a fact of
life, if you're running Linux.   You're users should expect no less.   

There are at least two side projects for GNUstep which aim to create a GNUstep
on Linux distribution.
 
> 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.

Have you tried Gorm?   It's the Interface Builder replacement for GNUstep.  
Given that you can literally take a book for Cocoa and write an app using the
instructions in it while using Gorm, I would say that it is almost as intuitive
as IB.   If you have any complaints let me know, as I am it's maintainer.

> [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.]

The former, most likely.

> >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.

CoreFoundation is one thing and one thing only: It was a way for Apple to
bridge Cocoa with the *ANCIENT* API known as Carbon.
 
> 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.  

Any hard numbers on this?   If you've got a comparison between two machines of
comparable power, I would like to see this.   Are you certain that apps, in
general, aren't slower on your Linux machine.  Unless, of course, you're
running PPC Linux on a dual boot G4/G5 Mac.

> 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.


Good for you.

 
> Wade Tregaskis

Later, GJC

=====
Gregory John Casamento -- CEO/President Open Logic Corp.
-- bheron on #gnustep, #linuxstep, & #gormtalk ---------------- 
Please sign the petition against software patents at: 
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-- Maintainer of Gorm (featured in April Linux Journal) -------

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