Re: Cross platform Cocoa/Obj-C
Re: Cross platform Cocoa/Obj-C
- Subject: Re: Cross platform Cocoa/Obj-C
- From: Mark Eaton <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2001 13:36:03 -0800
On Saturday, December 22, 2001, at 07:09 AM, Simson Garfinkel wrote:
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2001 19:42:38 -0800
To: <email@hidden>
From: Brian Hook <email@hidden>
Subject: Cross platform Cocoa/Obj-C
The important thing is portability to FreeBSD and/or Linux. With
Obj-C I
can do the majority of my coding with PB then (trivially?) port to
another
Unix platform using GnuStep - I hope. With Eiffel I can probably use
SmallEiffel for final deployment while doing the majority of it in one
of
the commercial IDEs.
You would have this kind of portability if the GnuStep project hadn't
been
largely stalled for something like 5 out of the last 10 years, or if the
folks at FSF had taken our advice and realized that the GNOME project
was a
disaster waiting to happen. You would even have more luck if Stallman
wasn't
religiously opposed to the #import dirrective, and if getting and
keeping
Objective-C support into GCC wasn't a never-ending battle.
Sad but true, if you need portability between FreeBSD and Linux, you are
probably better off using Qt and their Meta Object system, which is
about as
close as you can get to Objective-C without actually creating
Objective-C.
The funny thing is, they independently invented it. It would be nice if
they
had done some research before implementing something that is 1/3 as
good as
NeXTSTEP (which makes it 10x better than Windows, GNOME, Etc.)
On a slightly different but related topic, how much success have people
had with portability of non-GUI ObjC code between OS X, Linux, and Win32?
We have an upcoming project where we are considering writing the
back-end in ObjC because of the impedance matches between it and our
system. We have a hand-rolled object model written in C over the span of
the last 10 or so years, and we desperately want to rewrite it using an
OO language, but whatever language we choose has to pretty closely match
the existing object model. We would then develop the UI in a separate
layer, for each platform. One requirement is that loadable modules
written by third parties be easy to write in a variety of languages.
ObjC would be a good fit I think, providing we can support Win32 without
any difficulties.
Have other folks used gcc to compile large ObjC projects on and for
Win32? What pitfalls or shortcomings did you find?
thanks,
-mark