SOLVED win32/gnustep-gui classes not loading

[Stephen Brandon]

Hi folks,

After a couple of solid days tracking this one down I have
cracked it.

Symptoms:
gnustep-gui would compile and link ok on
win32/cygwin/mingw32, but any executable trying to use any
gnustep-gui classes would fail with the message "Failed to
load class..." with NSView or whatever.

This was a serious impediment to the MusicKit and SndKit as
we have several classes which inherit from AppKit classes,
and though there's no actual gui backend on Win32, we do
want the rest of the frameworks to be able to be compiled,
and linked to.

Solution:
The culprit was not any part of the gnustep-gui code, but
one of the external libraries. It was somehow preventing the
objc runtime from loading in classes from the gnustep-gui
dll.
The library in question is libtiff.a, as downloaded from
mingw.org (v3.4.1). It was not a core part of MinGW1.1, but
a separate library downloaded from their web site.
I tried to replace the faulty mingw library with the one
provided in cygwin, but trying to recompile gnustep-gui gave
a number of errors - the 2 libraries are not directly
compatible.
I have ended up downloading a recent version of libtiff
source (v 3.5.6-beta) and managed to hack it enough to
compile under mingw32/cygwin. I then simply replaced the
libtiff.a that I have got from mingw.org.

The hackery required for libtiff v3.5.6beta was to get
around the lack of a getopt/optind implementation (required
internally in the libtiff build routine). I got a free one
off the net and slotted it into place - worked a treat.

If anyone wants a copy of this "good" libtiff.a, please
e-mail me.

Cheers,
Stephen Brandon
stephen@brandonitconsulting.co.uk