Re: Cocoa To GnuStep port questions

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Monday, March 11, 2002, at 12:38 PM, Saibot wrote:

> Hello,
>  
> The company I am working for as two applications that work on mac OS X. 
> Both of these use the Objective C++ gcc compiler that apple provides.
>  
> We are going to check how GnuStep can help in making the port from Mac 
> OS X to windows and linux easier, and if we consider it the way to go, 
> probably allocate part of our time in coding for GnuStep.
>  
> I am not really familiar with NextStep, only with Cocoa, so if my 
> questions appear stupid, please forgive...
>  
> My questions are the following:
>  
> - Did any of you already try to use a gcc modified with the apple 
> patches to compile ObjC++ code that can run on windows/linux. I don't 
> really care whether anyone but me uses the compiler as long as it 
> generates code that performs the task on these 2 platforms as well as 
> on OS X. So, the patches being accepted into the mainstream gcc are not 
> something I really care about.

I don't know.

> - Does the GnuStep implementation of NextStep support anti-aliasing and 
> floating point coordinates for drawing.

No and yes.
The drawing system needs work if you have any intention of doing 
graphics intensive stuff.

> - How does a GnuStep program compare to a Cocoa application in terms of 
> performance? (it is obviously hardware dependant, but an approximation 
> will do me fine).

That's really too complex to answer ... benchmarks of some low-level 
operations put GNUstep much
faster, and I'm pretty sure that GNUstep-base is quite a bit faster than 
Cocoa Foundation overall,
but in the gui library things are definately the other way round.

> - Is GnuStep closer to NextStep in implementation or to Cocoa when 
> implementations differ

At the API level, it's much more like Cocoa than OpenStep, and not 
really like NeXTstep at all.
The appearance of the gui is very NeXTstep like.

> - Does GnuStep work on windows (I saw some notes about it on the 
> website but couldn't figure out whether it actually works or not, 
> especially since there is an item mentioning "port GUI to windows").

The base library works - including distributed objects - but is really 
new ... probably only
good for developers as there must be plenty of porting issues that need 
ironing out and haven't
even been discovered yet.  There is no gui for windows - it's a task on 
our todo list.

> - Does (or will) a widget (for instance, a NSButton) look the same on 
> windows and linux or do they each rely on the "typical" widget 
> appearance of the OS it runs on?

Depends on who writes the code :-)  Most likely things will have a 
NeXTstep look to them.


Most of the above and more should be answered in the FAQ on the website.