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.
Wow that is exciting. I often tell people we are a “submarine” project. We have been used by a lot of companies without them telling us. A few examples are Apportable (now PocketGems) as well as Algorridim. Also I learned that many of the online code challenge sites use GNUstep as their back end for Objective-C since it is easier to support on aws and less costly to deploy a Linux container (AMI).
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.
Same.
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.
This is high praise and much appreciated. Thank you. I speak for myself and, hopefully, others on the team when I say that GNUstep is a labor of love. It is a thing of beauty.
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.
Nothing solidifies a foundation like pressure. You must build something on top of it. Only then will you be sure of its stability. This is why developers on gnustep is so important. The larger the applications we can get using us the better it is for the project.
I work with keysight and our team is working on eggplant which is a powerful testing application. It is large and highly complex and thus has helped find and correct many flaws in the project. It helps us to improve.
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.
I couldn’t have said this (the above) any better myself.
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.
Yes. Indeed. I have found little reason to ever change it. To me it’s simple, elegant, and comfortable.
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.
Indeed.
Happy to support the project on Patreon and will continue doing so.
Thank you so much.
Marco Cawthorne
Yours, GC