Any work I have done has focused solely on getting *something* to work.
I've essentially tested if NSString works, and that's about it.
The best way to determine whether something you're interested works is
to try it out. I wasn't personally interested in getting more than a
proof that it is possible to continue to work on gnustep-base. And it is
possible. One can sit down, iterate and contribute upstream. Even that's
fantastic news compared to, say, four years ago. You "only" have to deal
with a nonstandard libc, nonstandard directory layouts, nonstandard
sandboxing approaches and a requirement to interface with Java. You
don't have to build your own compiler, deal with a custom build system
or (as was the case until recently on certain other platforms) find a
way to target a proprietary bytecode VM...
I'd say that, similar to any other platform where portability is not
proven yet nor guaranteed, it is best to start a project 'from scratch'
and work on target ports 'in parallel', adapting to quirks of each in
the process. Based on what experience I had with targeting Android in
general (and that isn't much), I'd treat porting existing code akin to
starting a new port of a game that draws with DirectX and in general
shows little consideration for non-Win32 platforms -- one year into the
project. It's probably not going to end well (or at least not without
many stolen staplers and burning buildings).
On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 11:40 AM, Mathias Bauer <mathias_bauer@gmx.net
<mailto:mathias_bauer@gmx.net>> wrote:
Hi,
what is the current status for GNUstep base on Android?
I did some research and found some activity, but mostly older stuff.
Nowadays one year already is quite old. :-)
From an external view point I see the following possible problems:
- as Linux/ARM showed us, exception handling and unwinding on ARM
don't work properly with clang <= 3.4, but that's the clang version
used by the Android NDK; so should we expect similar problems there?
- I couldn't find reliable information about libdispatch on Android,
and AFAIR Android does not have a fully compliant implemenation of
pthreads, so I'm concerned if the pthread-workingqueue lib (a
prerequisite of libdispatch) works on Android
- GNUstep base has some prerequisites like libxml2 etc.; I think
they all need to be compiled for Android also
- I wonder if there is an NSNetServices implementation in GNUstep
that works on Android
I know that there is apportable.com <http://apportable.com>, but
they claim not to use GNUstep anymore, so this does not give any
hints about the feasability of using GNUstep/libobjc2/libdispatch
for porting Objective-C code (at least code that does not use GUI
classes) from iOS to Android.
Regards,
Mathias
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