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Etoile: a GNUStep-based Linux GUI written in Objective-C

etoileos.com

31–40 of 46 posts

Re: Etoile: a GNUStep-based Linux GUI written in Objective-C

#31
I came across Etoile a few weeks back, posted it in a comment here. Glad to see others have run across it!

For those that think it's a dead project, it's not, check the mailing list. The devs are looking to move to GitHub, so hopefully we'll see more contributors. I'm going to get involved myself, I downloaded the source last night into a VM to have a fiddle :)

Re: Etoile: a GNUStep-based Linux GUI written in Objective-C

#32

I messed around with GNUstep on Ubuntu around 2011-ish when I tried to port an OS X service to Linux. (I did not touch Etoile, though, as I didn't need a GUI.) I didn't come away with a good impression at all. It was not very easy to get up and running, the documentation was lacking, requiring digging through many mailing lists, and it didn't support Objective-C 2.0... which was a big pain since the code was in Objec…

The GNUstep Objective-C runtime actually supported ARC before Apple even shipped their implementation: http://etoileos.com/news/archive/2011/07/03/1215/

Re: Etoile: a GNUStep-based Linux GUI written in Objective-C

#33

How viable nowadays is cross-platform application or server software development in Objective-C compared to the same in C++? GNUstep appears to be the best (only) solution for the former; is that so? Edit: To clarify, I'm asking this as a developer who does most work on Linux. My interest in Obj-C is primarily due to its Smalltalk-like message passing mechanism. Edit 2: clarity.

There's Apportable for Android ( http://www.apportable.com ), which—I'm guessing—likely uses Cocotron under the hood: http://www.cocotron.org But, in general, not very. Objective-C compilers certainly exist for Windows and Linux, but aren't worth much without Apple's frameworks.

Apportable does use Cocotron, but they also stitch in various other open source libraries that are found in the iOS runtime (libdispatch, CommonCrypto, etc):

http://www.apportable.com/open_source

Re: Etoile: a GNUStep-based Linux GUI written in Objective-C

#34

How viable nowadays is cross-platform application or server software development in Objective-C compared to the same in C++? GNUstep appears to be the best (only) solution for the former; is that so? Edit: To clarify, I'm asking this as a developer who does most work on Linux. My interest in Obj-C is primarily due to its Smalltalk-like message passing mechanism. Edit 2: clarity.

I played with GNUStep some time ago and well ...

Simple core foundation applications for the command line are no problem but as soon as you get into GUI land with cocoa the differences start to grow.

IMHO trying out GNUStep is a nice project for a weekend but forget any serious cross platform development ideas.

Re: Etoile: a GNUStep-based Linux GUI written in Objective-C

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's Apportable for Android ( http://www.apportable.com ), which—I'm guessing—likely uses Cocotron under the hood: http://www.cocotron.org But, in general, not very. Objective-C compilers certainly exist for Windows and Linux, but aren't worth much without Apple's frameworks.

Apportable does use Cocotron, but they also stitch in various other open source libraries that are found in the iOS runtime (libdispatch, CommonCrypto, etc): http://www.apportable.com/open_source

interesting, thanks for the link!

Re: Etoile: a GNUStep-based Linux GUI written in Objective-C

#36
post #5
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is old. The page is copyright 2010, and the last news post was mid 2012.

But the last code edit was 11 hours ago. Web page is not so important to me. http://svn.gna.org/viewcvs/etoile/

Argh! Svn!

Re: Etoile: a GNUStep-based Linux GUI written in Objective-C

#37
I'm involved with Étoilé, and am the lead developer on a framework called CoreObject (https://github.com/etoile/CoreObject) - it's an object persistence framework something like CoreData except it's also a DVCS.

We're going to properly launch a website for it and do an alpha release in a few weeks, but thought I would mention it since this is where most of the development on Étoilé is happening right now.

Re: Etoile: a GNUStep-based Linux GUI written in Objective-C

#38
post #32

I messed around with GNUstep on Ubuntu around 2011-ish when I tried to port an OS X service to Linux. (I did not touch Etoile, though, as I didn't need a GUI.) I didn't come away with a good impression at all. It was not very easy to get up and running, the documentation was lacking, requiring digging through many mailing lists, and it didn't support Objective-C 2.0... which was a big pain since the code was in Objec…

The GNUstep Objective-C runtime actually supported ARC before Apple even shipped their implementation: http://etoileos.com/news/archive/2011/07/03/1215/

Hmm, they really should update their wiki, I cannot find a mention of ARC on http://wiki.gnustep.org.

Re: Etoile: a GNUStep-based Linux GUI written in Objective-C

#39

How viable nowadays is cross-platform application or server software development in Objective-C compared to the same in C++? GNUstep appears to be the best (only) solution for the former; is that so? Edit: To clarify, I'm asking this as a developer who does most work on Linux. My interest in Obj-C is primarily due to its Smalltalk-like message passing mechanism. Edit 2: clarity.

There's Apportable for Android ( http://www.apportable.com ), which—I'm guessing—likely uses Cocotron under the hood: http://www.cocotron.org But, in general, not very. Objective-C compilers certainly exist for Windows and Linux, but aren't worth much without Apple's frameworks.

Speak for yourself. I do game dev in objc, with my own framework, and find it infinitely more useful than c++ even without the apple toolkits.

Re: Etoile: a GNUStep-based Linux GUI written in Objective-C

#40

How viable nowadays is cross-platform application or server software development in Objective-C compared to the same in C++? GNUstep appears to be the best (only) solution for the former; is that so? Edit: To clarify, I'm asking this as a developer who does most work on Linux. My interest in Obj-C is primarily due to its Smalltalk-like message passing mechanism. Edit 2: clarity.

I played with it last weekend. Not viable. Even the ubuntu packages don't produce a working dev environment. GNUstep is a major, standing lost opportunity for the free-software world. Imagine if the community had just taken openstep and don't a respectable job of this proven platform, instead of life in the wilderness with gnome/kde/unity/etc. Etoile is cool - I'd recommend they focus on making it easy to get a command-line GNUstep dev environment up, and bypass the fiddly IDE tools altogether.
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