Re: Cocotron used for a real-world app

[Nicolas Roard]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 1:56 PM, Truls Becken <truls.becken@gmail.com> wrote:
> Nicola Pero wrote:
>> Anyway, I agree that for an Xcode programmer the idea of just having a
>> button in Xcode that cross-compiles to Windows might be attractive.
>> I also agree with you that it would be nice for GNUstep to support that. :-)
>
> Even more awesome, was your idea of a button in Xcode that sends the
> code changes to the virtual machine, and triggers a recompile there.
> This would be easiest to implement as a network protocol, so sending
> it to a physical computer shouldn't make any difference. Perhaps using
> distributed objects?

It's definitely something you could do -- have a special script in
xcode triggered when you use a "windows" target, with the script
basically calling (lots of different possible ways to do this) the
gnustep installation in the VM to recompile the program.
Frankly I think it's a better approach than doing the
cross-compilation, specially considering installing GNUstep on windows
is just a matter of running the installer.

> The biggest challenge probably is syncing the code changes. If
> commiting to a repository for every cycle is acceptable, it would be
> easily solved that way.

A network drive might be doable (i.e. create a network drive on osx
and put your sources here, so they can be accessed both by xcode and
by the vm).

The only last hurdle is the GNUmakefile generation -- there is no
xcode->gnumakefile translator anywhere ? surely it can't be that hard
to do -- iirc the xcode stuff is in xml.

-- 
Nicolas Roard