Re: Cocoa/Windows parallel dvlpmt

[Philip Mötteli]

Am 03.02.2004 um 18:03 schrieb John Stiles:
> On Feb 2, 2004, at 12:54 PM, Alex Perez wrote:
> Oh please. Not all of us have the time to reimplement Cocoa from 
> scratch.

No, just complete what's missing for you.


> 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

Nobody reinvents. It's officially a copy. No invention at all. Very 
important, because design is the moste time consuming part of OOSE. And 
the design is already done and best of breed.


> by hand--we want something that already works! You can't fault us for 
> that.

That's understandable. But everybody wants that. And if everybody would 
be like you...


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

Better? Foundation is sometimes very (!) annoying because of its 
CoreFoundation! Try e.g. to write a transparent persistence layer. 
Modestly said: very, very ugly.
Or all those (void*) as instance variables. Impossible to handle. So on 
the one hand, you have a beautiful language like ObjC with a lot of 
runtime information and on the other hand you have Apple's Foundation 
implementation.
Distributed Objects are also better in GNUstep.
And if you have a problem, you debug lightning faster in GNUstep, 
because you trace through the source of "Foundation". Actually the only 
things, that are better on MOSX are AppKit and Xcode.


> 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.

That's what I don't understand. I mean rewriting, debugging, otpimizing 
and maintaining the whole thing (over the whole software life cycle!), 
instead of just completing, what's missing in gnustep-gui? Because the 
moment, you have completed something in GNUstep, the next one will 
complete the next thing, because now it became more interesting for 
him. It's like an avalanche. And you have the source, so you can 
optimize, what's not yet good enough for you.
And very importantly: The design is best of breed, so you should 
actually end up in your own gui with the same design as AppKit.


> 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.

Well, I don't know the result of the thread, but I think they want 
that. Just the way, OpenStep on Windows did it. And in my eyes it did 
it very well.


> 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.

I actually never succeeded in defining the l-a-f of Windows. For me 
there's just a huge mix of everything. So I think, there's a big 
flexible lane, which is easy to target.



Re
Phil