Re: Darling

[Luboš Doležel]

On Fri, 02 Aug 2013 18:20:35 +0200, Fred Kiefer wrote:
> Hi Lubos,
>
> sad to hear that GNustep gui is giving you so much trouble. Could you
> please expand a bit on what it is that goes wrong for you? There is 
> one
> big difference between gui and base that is that base already 
> supports
> the hiding of the instance variables. Would it help you to have that
> implemented in gui as well?

Hi,

if you mean adding an extra level of indirection like this:

@interface SomeClass {
   void* allMyIvarsAreHere;
}

then this is definitely needed for 32-bit OS X apps. 64-bit ones are OK 
thanks to the non-fragile ABI.
I've been mostly dealing with 64-bit apps so far, but I'll surely speak 
up when this becomes a problem. I think NSView will be the first class 
that won't "fit".

> There are other reasons why base should be easier, for example most 
> base
> classes are actually class clusters and user code has no expectations
> about the actual object layout. Subclassing base classes is far less
> common than sunclassing NSView. We cannot do anything about these and
> some other differences, but I am willing to support you with things 
> that
> need changing in gui. But be aware that binary compatibility to Apple
> has never been a goal for GNUstep.

The ABI compatibility is actually not such a big deal and GNUstep is 
doing surprisingly well in this regard, more so after the 
NSInteger/NSUInteger size correction.

The problem is the NIB loader (the NSClassSwapper problem and other 
random issues), missing support for short language names ("en.lproj"), 
missing classes (would you accept dummy, empty classes for autolayout 
support?) and other crashes I haven't had time to debug properly. 
Basically, it's all things that you would encounter even when using 
gnustep-gui for native apps.

--
Luboš Doležel