I've done a lot of looking into this. The results are:
If its a command line app that uses foundation only, its very easy. In
fact I'd go so far as to say GNUstep is a viable Objective C version
of the C++ standard library in terms of portability. Note: apple is
even working on releasing the Objective-C 2.0 features to gcc in the
coming year.
The GUI side is not quite so rosy a picture though. While its possible
to load cocoa nibs directly in GNUstep and thus probably the
portability issue is still not so bad, this means your app will really
only integrate well into the GNUstep environment aesthetically. This
environment is different from all the Linux desktop environments and
users either like it or not. Their goal on the visuals are to
reproduce the NeXT environment which today looks very dated and does
not at all integrate well with gnome or kde. Even on windows it has
the NeXT look and feel. The GUI I think also probably is current maybe
to jaguar, and does not support bindings I think.
So depending on how forgiving your users are, this is a definite
maybe. On the other hand, its open source, and if you have the
resources to contribute to it to make cocoa apps more portable that
can be great too.
I often wish Apple took more interest in spreading Cocoa to other
platforms. Releasing the 2.0 changes is great but only a small part of
that.
I'd love to be able to tell fresh college students to learn objective-
c because it will help them work on any platform.
On Mar 8, 2008, at 12:20 AM, "William Zumwalt" <email@hidden>
wrote:
Anyone have any experience trying to port a Cocoa XCode app to
linux? Are
the GnuStep or OpenStep libs compatible w/ Cocoa's NextStep? I'd
really like
to try this if it will work and wondering if anyone else has done
the same.
It's not a simple command line app in obj-c, but rather, uses Cocoa
and was
developed on Tiger, haven't made the move to Leopard yet.
Any help, advice much appreciated.
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