“A little over one year after the 1.0 release, I’m happy to announce the 1.6 release of the GNUstep Objective-C runtime. This provides a superset of the functionality of Apple’s Mac OS X 10.7/iOS 5 runtimes and provides a solid foundation for Objective-C and Objective-C++ development on Free Software platforms.”
I’ve never used any of the GNUStep / Cocoa API, but I really appreciate any work that furthers the option of using Objective-C on Linux. I used it to make one of my video games (Objective-C + Allegro) and it quickly became one of my favorite languages.
Actually, this is exactly why I wrote my ObjC framework – I didn’t want to be limited to OS X and write software using one framework that exists everywhere.
If you’re interested, have a look at https://webkeks.org/objfw/. It’s quite mature already, yet there’s still to do and not many use it yet. Be sure to check out the development version, as the last release is quite outdated and a new release will come soon!
Very nice. I downloaded the documentation and checked it out.
How far do you plan on taking it? Will you be implementing any sort of GUI toolkit?
The documentation on the homepage is of the quite old 0.5 release. Be sure to check out the developer version and type doxygen there to get an up-to-date documentation. It includes a lot of classes more now
.
As for the UI framework, the problem is that it’s hard to have an abstraction for UIs that does look native anywhere – that’s almost impossible, I guess. Maybe the better way is to just create bindings to common toolkits and have similar APIs so it’s easy to port from one toolkit to another.
People who want to run their Mac OS X on their own hardware should instead work on a Mac OS X clone. It seems that most of pieces needed to create such clone are freely available.
Hmmm… I’m surprised there isn’t a project like ReactOS… You are right the components are there… Though also some massive holes, and I dread to think about some hidden legal pitfalls…
We can’t have a Mac Wine? I’d love to have Rosetta ported to Linux for all my old PPC software that wasn’t made Universal Binary that I had collected before I ditched Apple hardware.
Why? My old G4 boxes are getting kind crusty and buying replacement parts for them is a hassle.
There’s always PearPC… (or even SheepShaver, if those are just Mac OS Classic apps, still)
Yeah, nominally a bit slow method – but it shouldn’t matter much with a software which essentially stands still, and with the continuing massive progress of (also per single core) CPU performance.
(and hey, you already own the OS / in sane jurisdictions one is perfectly entitled to run it “wherever” – as long as running only one copy at a time)
There is a GNUStep based desktop in the OSX style, called EtoiléOS, although it has not visibly moved for quite a while.
http://etoileos.com/
The mailing lists are quite active — a lot of work being done on the developer frameworks.
Back in 1999 I had to port a rendering engine from Objective-C to C++.
At the time I really enjoyed Objective-C and the NeXT environment, but never managed to play around with it again.
Thanks to the FSF efforts it is easy to access Objective-C in another operating systems besides MacOS X.
There is a lot of animosity towards Obj-C, but I love it. There is a degree of maturity with the runtime that I’ve not found in other oop systems.
We are lucky GNUStep exists, otherwise MacOSX would be the only place it could be used!
Is there an alternative SDK which can allow compiling for iOS without being bound by their draconian developer agreement?
Well, even if you could, what would be the use since you can’t distribute your software to normal people ?