Re: Objective-C & GNUstep Base on Ubuntu compute cluster: crazy?

[Scott Christley]

On Mar 30, 2011, at 11:17 AM, David Kulp wrote:

> I took a hiatus from non-GUI scientific programming to develop iOS and MacOS 
> apps.  I'm smitten with Objective-C and the Foundation kit (plus a number of 
> other nice Apple kits like Core Data).  And XCode is pretty impressive -- 
> although I'm still an emacs user at heart.  Anyway, now I'm back into 
> scientific programming -- i.e. non-GUI number-crunching apps running on linux 
> clusters.  I despise C++ and would love to avoid it as much as possible, 
> although the current corporate culture is C++/R/Perl.
> 
> I thought I'd use Apple's CF-Lite, but that is no longer supported.
> 
> So am I crazy to even consider this?  Can a minimal GNUstep be easily built 
> on Ubuntu without a GUI.  Is it conceivable that I could develop in Xcode on 
> my mac and test and deploy to a linux box?  Anyone else do this?

This is what I do for my research.  I put code into frameworks (google 
BioCocoa) and write simple command-line utilities for running stuff.  A GNUstep 
makefile can reside in the source code next to the Xcode project files without 
any problem, so its easy to compile and install on the linux box.

> 
> Considering how prevalent Mac OS X is as the desktop/laptop environment among 
> the scientific/academic computing folks, I would think there would be a lot 
> of interest in leveraging the Objective C development tools for cluster 
> computing, high performance computing, cloud computing, etc.

The only problem I've ever had is not having the required software available, 
some admins only have C and C++ installed, xml library not installed, stuff 
like that, but in all cases its an easy install for the admin.  I install 
GNUstep myself locally, along with my research tools.  I've used on all types 
of clusters, Intel-based, AMD-based, GPU clusters, etc.  NSOperation works well 
so you have simple access to multi-core parallelism.  You can also use MPI 
without a problem, it just requires linking some additional C libraries in the 
GNUstep makefile.

cheers
Scott