Re: Cocoa/Windows parallel dvlpmt

[John Stiles]

On Feb 2, 2004, at 12:54 PM, Alex Perez wrote:

> > While these goals may ultimately be achieved by the GNUStep project, 
> > it
> > seems to me that noone is really working on the Windows port right 
> > now.
> > This is too bad because it would make a wonderful porting base (a lot
> > of their code is mature).
>
> I get real sick of people saying this. It's an open-source project! If
> you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Whiners
> really ought to either (A) keep their opinions to themselves, or (B)
> Contribute.

Oh please. Not all of us have the time to reimplement Cocoa from 
scratch.

I appreciate that open source doesn't write itself, but most of us are 
looking for stuff like GNUstep because we DON'T want to reinvent Cocoa 
by hand--we want something that already works! You can't fault us for 
that.

> I'm a GNUstep user and know there's active development on the
> win32 backend. The goal is "Stability First", so I think the old "put 
> up
> or shut up" adage rings true here. If Mac developers spent half as much
> time contributing to GNUstep as they did whining about how much it 
> sucked,
> it'd be a world-class product!

Mac developers have no need to contribute to GNUstep. We have a better 
version already.

I think most cross-platform developers, like me, would rather just 
re-roll their interface code as native Win32 instead of investing the 
time in a second-class solution that will never look as good as a true 
Win32-native rewrite. If a goal of GNUstep were to mimic the l-a-f of 
the target OS instead of looking like Xwindows or something, then I 
think it would have a lot more appeal to developers of production-level 
applications. But most of us right now just write native code for each 
target platform, because that's what end users prefer. If the app 
you're writing is very GUI-intensive, you may make an abstraction layer 
or mini-framework that lets you spend more time in cross-platform land, 
but even that tends to cause little rifts where end-users occasionally 
get behavior that they wouldn't normally expect from their platform of 
choice.