Re: Some questions regarding GNUstep (again)

[Wim Oudshoorn]

"Y. J. Chun" <yjchun@mac.com> writes:

> 4. GNUstep project page has been saying, for a long time, that
> windows support is not stable yet. I think we would use
> MinGW. Considering we are not using any GUI applications, how stable
> is it? is there any reference project out there already using
> gnustep to port objective-c applications to windows? (open source or
> not i dont care)

We are porting an application from WebObjects 3.5 to GNUstep
on windows (MinGW).  Upto now we have discovered only a few
problems.  So I would say that GNUstep on windows is stable.
The things I know about that do not work are:

* The runloop uses select somewhere, and under windows
  select accept only sockets.  This means that adding an
  NSPipe to the runloop will not work.  
  Solving this problem will take a lot of time.  We worked
  around this problem.

* Consequence of above, the new Cocoa methods 
  to perform selectors in the "Main" thread will not work.
  This is easier to fix. Note however that multithreading 
  works fine.  For interthread communication you can either
  fix the method or use DO to communicate between threads.

There are probably more issues, but I can't remember them right
now.

> 5. Is there performance issue on windows version of GNUstep?

Not that I am aware of, but I guess it really depends on what you
are doing.  

> 6. Is there any issues regarding mixing Win32 APIs with GNUstep
> system?

Not that I am aware of, but I have to say we hardly use any Win32 APi
directly.

> 1. Is it possible to build a standalone executable that does not
> require GNUstep installation? I want to deploy our product without
> any external dependency. If I could just ship our product along with
> libgnustep-base.so.1, that is ok as our product already has internal
> libraries. But i see GNUstep installation has additional support
> files. Is there any way i can go without those files but just a
> single gnustep library?

I don't know under linux.  But under windows we install
the complete GNUstep base system in the same directory
as our application.  Then we use a small application
to set the environment right and launch the rest.
But I think that Sheldon Gill is making changes
that makes this simpler.

I hope these answers help.


Wim Oudshoorn.