Hi
Simon,
On
12/11/24 10:36, Simon Gornall wrote:
Hi folks,
I’ve been a Mac engineer for the last couple of
decades, and now I find myself looking at writing
something that will work on both Windows and the Mac.
If it were just for me, (from reading around) I think
it’d be quite straightforward - just install MSYS, the
GNUstep packages, and start running with it, but I
might want to distribute this application in the
future, and I’m cautious about requiring a GNUstep
install as a part of that, it seems like a reasonably
high bar.
In fact, I’ll be using SDL (3, if it matters) for
the graphics side (which is cross-platform), what I’m
really after here is the runtime and Foundation
framework that I’ve come to know and love - even
better if it has ARC :)
libobjc2 is a pretty mature runtime, and it has useful
features the
Apple runtime doesn’t have, such as typed selectors (so
having two
methods in different classes with the same name but
different types
is no longer undefined behavior) and stuff to support
dynamic
languages that have other object models. Our Foundation
implementation, gnustep-base, is also pretty mature, and if
your
code doesn’t work on gnustep-base it shouldn’t be too hard
to get it
working. If you need CoreFoundation, that might be a bit
more
difficult. I don’t know the status of gnustep-corebase, and
I have a
Linux-only port of the Catalina CoreFoundation with
toll-free
bridging enabled that I’m currently working on.
I found
https://github.com/gnustep/tools-windows-msvc but
it’s not clear whether this results in something I can
package up (binary, DLLs in the same directory etc.)
and have an easy-to-use install.exe that means the
end-user doesn’t have to install GNUstep, or whether
it depends on filesystem layout etc (as I recall
GNUstep needing, from using it a long while ago).
I have read a fair number of “it’s hard to get it
working on Windows” posts/articles but I’m hoping
these are a bit self-selecting - people who did
struggle and wrote about it doesn’t mean that everyone
struggles… They’re also a bit older, and I’m (again)
hoping things keep improving :)
Anyway, and info/hints from people who’ve done
something like this would be appreciated - I’m at the
stage where I’m planning stuff, and I don’t want to
paint myself into a corner. There’s always the option
of using C++. But… you know… :)
You should look at
https://gnustep.github.io/Guides/Setup/Windows/index.html;
it includes all the information that Hugo Melder wrote about
Windows
setup. You should definitely be using tools-windows-msvc. I
don’t
know how to package it on Windows since I don’t use Windows
often,
but I know people have done it in the past for some decently
large
commerical applications, such as Algoriddim djay.
​