Re: open letter about development proposals

[Nicolas Roard]

On 2003-08-05 07:10:46 +0000 stefan@wms-network.de wrote:

> i looked at the camino/gecko sources a couple of days ago. since camino
> depends on gecko you will first have to port the gecko engine to
> GNUstep.Gecko itself seems to use Carbon for the Mac-implementation.
> Camino itself uses Objective-C++. Btw: does "Apple's extensive ObjC
> changes being merged back" include objc++?

Not for the moment; but they are planning to include ObjC++. With a bit
of luck it will be for gcc 3.4, but that's not sure.

> However, i think porting gecko
> can be very hard especially if you take a look at the sources (no, i do
> not flame c++ but this stuff is really ugly from my point of view).

I agree with that : they built a sort of dynamic OO system on top of C++,
in fact, kinda like Objective-C ;-)
The result is strange. And it looks weird if you compare it to ObjC...

> > Many consider KHTML/bindings (as used by Apple's Safari, and recently by
> > Omni) the better implementation. If/when ObjC++ is available via gcc,
> > porting KHTML to GNUstep would probably be even easier.
>
> Thats what i think too. I already made some (rundimentary) investigations
> about porting the KWQ-Layer to GNUstep without using objc++ (don't know
> when this becomes available). I think it's not too difficult to rewrite
> this layer using pure C to communicate with GNUstep. Is anyone interestet
> in participating? I think it's too much for one person (or it will take a
> long time).

Well, it depends in *when* ObjC++ will became available; if that's planned
for gcc 3.4, I'm not sure it's worth the effort -- just wait for ObjC++ and port
WebCore and JavaCore.

> > Using WebCore (and JavaCore) a browser _completely_ based on GNUstep
> > could be written within a very short time...
> and it will probaply give us a nice browser with a complete GNUstep
> interface. No more need for gtk :-)

yes :-)
imho KHTML is nicer/cleaner than gecko, structurally speaking. And with
Apple using it we are sure that it will evolve well to support as many pages
as possible ...
--
Nicolas Roard <nicolas@roard.com> PGP : 
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http://www.petitiononline.com/laafs/petition.html
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