Re: GNUStep for mobile?

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 4:49 PM, Zack <zck590@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> Has anyone contemplated using GNUStep, or a variant thereof, on a mobile
> device
> instead of Android? Is there any project already in existence such as this?
> -Zack

Am 22.09.2012 um 18:12 schrieb Stefan Bidi:

> I have not personally done such a thing, but you might want to take a
> look at (http://www.quantum-step.com/).  The maintainer is Nikolaus,
> and he's a member of this mailing list, so he will likely have
> something to say, as well.

Yes, sure. There is a long story to say :)

Well, QuantumSTEP is sort of a derivative/clone/parallel-development/fertilizer
of/for GNUstep.

Originally the idea was to have a stripped down version of a Cocoa compatible
system to better cope with limited memory size and missing FPUs. Therefore it
started ~2003 in mGstep because GNUstep appeared to be too oversized for
a handheld device (Zaurus SL-5500) at that time.

But over time more and more API was added to become more Mac OS compatible
These additions were mostly written from scratch to better fit into the 
existing code
or just for fun of learning how to do things. Sometimes GNUstep did take them or
develop its own solution. And some other times, code from GNUstep was taken
and now the Foundation/AppKit is quite complete (compared to 10.5).

It still has some optimization for minimizing FPU usage, but it has its own
X11 backend without Xrender - which is the main speed barrier on current
ARM-Cortex based systems (e.g. GTA04). Another optimization is that it does
screen scaling so that the same application binary can be operated fairly well
on a 2.8 inch portrait and a 7 inch landscape screen. And some optimizations
for operation without keyboard (how do you open a context menu without a right
mouse button or a control key?).

So it is not GNUstep but sort of "Cousin". Or better: a Symbiont.

And, in some areas it is more than GNUstep, because it provides several 
frameworks
for mobile devices: MapKit (OSM based), CoreTelephony, CoreWLAN just to name
some.

There is also a set of typical mobile applications but these are currently not
open source:

http://www.quantum-step.com/swi/

And, there is a Debian binary package repository for armel, mipsel, i386.
All is work in progress and quite unstable... So there are rarely announcements.

There hasn't been much visible progress in the past 2 years, but work continues
in very small "quantum steps" in unpredictable patterns :)

"Official" distribution is done as source code snapshots:

http://download.goldelico.com/quantumstep/sources/

Finally important to note: it uses a different build system, a set of
cross-compilers and Xcode 3. So it currently can't be built on a Linux
system or even the Linux target.

But if you have a fairly recent mobile with Debian (like the GTA04) you can
easily install GNUstep. Just 'apt-get install gobjc' and the sources...

BR,
Nikolaus