Re: OpenOffice.org on OS X and GNUstep

[Adrian Robert]

On Oct 6, 2005, at 10:17 AM, Stefan Urbanek wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Following article made me think:
>
> http://macslash.org/article.pl? 
> sid=05/10/05/1132218&mode=thread&threshold=-1
>
> What do you think about showing, in some official way, to the  
> OO.org development
> community, that there is GNUstep that can be used as an option for  
> creating at
> least some parts of OO.org OS X port? I mean, main argument should be:
> - if they would use GNUstep, they will widen developer and support  
> base to those
> who do not own a Mac and therefore do not have OS X
> - on OS X they would use Cocoa, on other platforms they can use  
> GNUstep for
> development
> - with GCC 4+ it would be possible to mix Objective C (cocoa) code  
> with C++
> (oo.org) code
>
> I think they are not very aware of GNUstep.

We should definitely try to raise their awareness.  I see on a  
referenced page there that they are thinking Cocoa, which is good,  
but my biggest fear is still that they would undertake the effort  
using Carbon, which other big and recent projects have done (Mozilla  
port, Andrew Choi's Emacs and XEmacs ports, etc.).  I think this  
usually happens when the developers in charge come from a Carbon and/ 
or C++ background or start from an OS 9 base.  It's unfortunate, both  
because it shuts out GNUstep, and because using the higher-level  
Cocoa API is cleaner, easier, and more maintainable.

Case in point is Emacs on Aqua (http://emacs-on-aqua.sf.net), where  
the code for the Cocoa/GNUstep windowing system support is half the  
size of the other two (X and W32), yet provides greater  
functionality.  That's for emacs-20, but this is remaining true in my  
porting effort for emacs-23 (http://emacs-app.sf.net), where  
comparison with the Carbon port is possible.  (Carbon's about 2x  
Cocoa -- W32 is about 2.8x (though that includes a unix compatibility  
layer), and X is over 3x, though this is Xlib we're talking about..)

Emacs on Aqua (not to toot my own horn here) is also an excellent  
illustration of Cocoa-GNUstep compatibility.  There are only a few  
#ifdefs distinguishing between the two, most relating to the fact  
Emacs goes to pretty low levels to do text rendering.  (OOO probably  
needs to as well -- won't get away with just slapping in an  
NSTextView there -- but this code can be encapsulated well.)  There's  
no significant functionality that the port on OS X has that the  
GNUstep version doesn't.  (Now if I tried to implement the printing  
framework users keep asking for, maybe that would change.)

GNUMail is the other major cross-platform app I know about that  
demonstrates the same points -- and I think there are others?

BTW, is gcc-4.1 needed to link separate C++ and ObjC files, or just  
to mix in the same file?  (In Emacs, ObjC code lives in its own  
files, and provides a C interface for external interaction, though  
there's only C, no C++ there.)