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

[John W Kennedy]

On 2011-03-30 12:17:18 -0400, David Kulp said:

> 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?
>
> 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.

Apple itself is obviously looking into that sort of thing, what with 
Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL. There is a problem, though, with 
Objective-C, itself, in that method (or message) dispatch can, in some 
cases, represent a major cost.

--
John W Kennedy
Having switched to a Mac in disgust at Microsoft's combination of 
incompetence and criminality.