Re: I wrote about the new GSDE package on the Register

[Marco Cawthorne]

On 2023-07-28 11:25:28 -0700 Gregory Casamento 
<greg.casamento@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello list, I just wanted to represent myself here and my colleagues
at Vera Visions, L.L.C. that work with GNUstep daily because
our internal applications rely on it.

GSDE is a great and exciting project.  Someone I know and myself have
written to the author in the past about how much we appreciate the
tweaks he does on WindowMaker. Looking forward to it maturing.

On APIs:
I came from the Win32 world over a decade ago, having then written Qt,
Gtk+, Java (AWT! Swing!) apps and gotten frustrated with the quality
of APIs and the longevity of them.

GNUstep is extremely powerful, I can serialize modern data forms with
ease and on top of that you can go and compile 20 year old applications
and they run, look and feel just as they did back then.

It's the closest thing we have to Win32. There is nothing that
compares.  Nothing has this level of compatibility while still moving
forward and introducing modern APIs in this space.

On a reference environment:
As we say in the games industry, an engine is unproven without a game
to go along with it. GNUstep is a lot like that without a desktop 
environment
in that it really needs to capture the hearts first and the mind later.
It's a big set of classes and standard apps aren't enough to test them.
Case in point: NSFileManager and remote filesystems needs/needed work
as it would swallow files whole. I haven't verified recent commits in 
-base,
but I've seen classes get touched in that regard which gives me hope.

Users may not appreciate the APIs themselves, but they will appreciate
the level of consistency throughout the environment as a result of them
and the devs having to write less code.

On the default look at feel:
I like the default look, many people I've talked to prefer the NeXT
style over other attempts because it's simple and consistent.

There are also a few former Mac developers around the list which
have switched to GNUstep so they could keep working in their favorite
environment, I think that speaks volumes.

Happy to support the project on Patreon and will continue doing so.

Marco Cawthorne