Objective-C & GNUstep Base on Ubuntu compute cluster: crazy?

[David Kulp]

I took a hiatus from non-GUI scientific programming to develop iOS and  
MacOS apps.  I'm smitten with Objective-C and the Foundation kit (plus  
a number of other nice Apple kits like Core Data).  And XCode is  
pretty impressive -- although I'm still an emacs user at heart.   
Anyway, now I'm back into scientific programming -- i.e. non-GUI  
number-crunching apps running on linux clusters.  I despise C++ and  
would love to avoid it as much as possible, although the current  
corporate culture is C++/R/Perl.

I thought I'd use Apple's CF-Lite, but that is no longer supported.

So am I crazy to even consider this?  Can a minimal GNUstep be easily  
built on Ubuntu without a GUI.  Is it conceivable that I could develop  
in Xcode on my mac and test and deploy to a linux box?  Anyone else do  
this?

Considering how prevalent Mac OS X is as the desktop/laptop  
environment among the scientific/academic computing folks, I would  
think there would be a lot of interest in leveraging the Objective C  
development tools for cluster computing, high performance computing,  
cloud computing, etc.

Thanks for your thoughts.