Looking at all those FEA frameworks available already, I don't know
wether it is a good idea to start yet another one almost from
scratch. Big part of the usefulness of FEA code is it's proven
reliability and projects like CalculiX, code_aster, OpenCFD, Gerris,
Elmer, ... are more advanced regarding this. Have a look at
www.caelinux.com and it's forum for a more complete list.
Second important point with FEA software is it's capability to import
geometry from standard formats like IGES or STEP and to calculate
meshes on this geometry. Salome, using OpenCascade, is pretty good at
this and if it's a measure, it comes along with an installed size of
no less than 600 MB. Gmsh is a lot smaller, still it has some ten
years of development and testing behind it.
That said, I agree with the idea of using GNUstep as an engineer's
development platform. Obj-C is easy to learn and a lot more robust
than other popular languages like Fortran or C++. In fact, I did a
few steps towards joining GNUstep, Etoile and the contents of
CAELinux already, but that's a huuuge task. Dozens of code bundles to
download, build and install in a useable manner. I started with
Ubuntu Edgy, if that matters.
Wow! I didn't know there were that many free FAE software out there! Most of my experience in this stuff has been in IDEAS, ProM, ANSYS, and the other classical software to solve these. I was going to take this project mostly as a hobby seeing as I have a lot of time in my hands right now. I'll have a look at the ones you mentioned plus all the stuff on the CAELinux forums.
On that note, I actually envisioned the project to incorporate more than just FAE, and eventually (even though probably don't have the skills to do this, so other people would need to help) create a full Physics/Engineering framework. It's a big test, but I think the most time consuming thing would be actually writing the code seeing as all the procedures are already well established and there's really not much to build on.
One thing I found very strange though was that NSMatrix doesn't exist under Foundation, it's actually in AppKit. The first thing I learn in my science/math classes was that an array is just a special kind of matrix, yet NSArray exists under Foundation. Just something I noticed when I was going through the libraries last night.
Stefan