Re: Cocoa/Windows parallel dvlpmt
Re: Cocoa/Windows parallel dvlpmt
- Subject: Re: Cocoa/Windows parallel dvlpmt
- From: Philip Mötteli <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2004 20:24:16 +0100
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
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