Re: Some thoughts about GS

[Marco Scheurer]

Please allow me to offer some random thoughts and comments, even if I've  
only been an observer of GNUstep, and never contributed anything.

A few months ago, I was thinking along the same lines as Phil. That KDE  
and Gnome, however ugly, exist, have applications, a big following, and so  
on, so it could be nice to somehow be able to use say GNUstep and Gnome  
together to develop Linux desktop  apps. Now I'm not so sure.

I think that GNUstep could pick up what Apple let down: cross-platform  
development. I'm definitely not a fan of Windows, but the possibility of  
recompiling your apps on Windows (and have them look like Windows apps)  
could be a "killer feature", something likely to attract developers.

Another killer app for GNUstep would of course be the GNUstepWeb / EOF  
clone combo. I know about the issues with that.

About the barrier of Objective C. As much as I like Objective C (and I  
like it a lot!) I have to agree with those who do not like to be forced to  
use one language or another. After all, I hate being forced to use Java. It  
would be nice if GNUstep could attain some kind of language neutrality, or  
offer bindings for Java, Smalltalk, LISP, Python... Something like the  
promises made by .NET / C# .

Last, we could ask ourselves if some of the moves made by Apple would not  
be appropriate for GNUstep as well. I'm thinking about CoreFoundation and  
CoreGraphics and dropping DPS...

Marco Scheurer
Sen:te, Lausanne, Switzerland     http://www.sente.ch