Re: ABI compatibility with Cocoa

[David Chisnall]

You might be interested in a NetBSD project that did the same thing about 8 
years ago.  They eventually gave up because all of the interesting OS X 
software (e.g. the window server) has hooks so deeply into the Mach layer, and 
everything on top of it has close dependencies on it, that you effectively need 
99% of OS X to have anything interesting.

Replacing Cocoa's AppKit with GNUstep is difficult.  In theory, you should be 
able to just add Apple runtime parts for the runtime-specific things in, for 
example, NSObject.  This isn't trivial, because OS X does layering in different 
places to us.  You'll also find problems from any applications that rely on 
implementation details of the OS X frameworks.

David

On 5 Aug 2012, at 14:32, Luboš Doležel wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> as part of my diploma thesis I'm working on a userspace Darwin compatibility 
> layer for Linux. The primary task is to get unmodified console applications 
> running on top of a Wine-like layer. Currently, I'm working on a compatible 
> libSystem.dylib reimplementation - i.e. resolving ABI issues and implementing 
> missing Mach and BSD kernel calls, albeit in many cases it's just a dummy 
> function.
> 
> http://darling.dolezel.info/
> 
> As a long-term aim, I would also like to get other applications running - 
> personally especially 3D games, but ordinary GUI apps as well. One of the 
> important pieces is Cocoa and GNUstep seems to be a good choice for dealing 
> with AppKit implementation on Linux.
> 
> Towards this end, I'd like to ask what you see as the biggest hurdles in ABI 
> (not just API) compatibility when replacing Apple's AppKit with GNUstep?
> 
> I'd like to note that I realize what I'm trying to achieve is a *tremendous* 
> task, but well, I believe it can be done!
> 
> Regards,
> -- 
> Luboš Doležel
> 
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