GNUstep vs. The Cocotron for Mac to Windows porting

[Dr. Rolf Jansen]

I am a Mac developer and in the past I successfully used The Cocotron to port, 
build and distribute one of my bigger GUI application projects for Windows. 
This one is feature complete now, and I am now looking forward to port one of 
my next big projects to Windows. I am considering to use GNUstep for this, 
however, I got some questions:


1. Look & Feel

I want my applications look & feel native on Windows, and I am demanding on 
that. I read, that the WinUXTheme is still under development, and my question 
is now what exactly does this mean. Do most of the GUI elements work and look 
nice? Or, perhaps, do only the buttons look nice and the other stuff looks and 
feels somehow? What is missing? Does it crash any now and then? For my other 
application, I submitted some contributions to The Cocotron in order to letting 
it behave and look good on Windows.


2. Interface Builder compatibility

Can I use my .xib-files (Deployment target OS X 10.6) without any changes for 
building Windows applications? With The Cocotron I can.


3. Shared Code Base

My other GUI application got apprx. 25000 lines of custom Objective-C and C 
code, and it is a shared code base for both platforms Mac OS X and Windows. 
With a little bit of coding discipline, I was able to keep the number of 
platform specific #ifdef segments low (perhaps 5 small snippets). Can I expect 
the same with GNUstep for my still to be ported application (apprx. 50000 
lines, other purpose, same coding style).


4. PDF readiness

My application requires reading and flawless display of PDF files, as well as 
generation of PDF files from its view contents, some of which may become really 
huge. Does this work with GNUstep on Windows?


5. RTF views and editing

Does GNUstep provide complete RTF compatibility, editing and display. Here The 
Cocotron is lacking, and the application to be ported to Windows does rely 
heavily on perfect RTF text formatting capabilities. So actually, my concerns 
may be rephrased to, whether it would be more work for me to implement the 
missing RTF capabilities into The Cocotron, compared to implement something 
into GNUstep if not to work around any other shortcomings in GNUstep.


6. License question

I read that it is best to ship my application with the GNUstep frameworks in 
separate .dll files, so end users may replace the frameworks by their 
customized ones. Is this correct? In addition, I must not prohibit reverse 
engineering of my application interface to GNUstep. As a matter of fact, my 
EULA's do not mention anything about reverse engineering, would this be OK, or 
do I need to positively permit reverse engineering?

If I need to change something within GNUstep, then my intention is to commit my 
changes upstream, and ideally the GNUstep frameworks shipped with my 
application would be based on the upstream code at the given point in time. 
This is how, I handled it with The Cocotron. May I expect the same with 
GNUstep? Do I need to provide the sources in a separate place anyway, or may I 
simply add a link to the GNUstep SVN repository on a prominent place (e.g. the 
About panel) of my application?

Anything else to obey with?

Many thanks for any kind replies.

Best regards

Dr. Rolf Jansen