Re: "Wayland Maker - A Wayland compositor inspired by Window Maker"

[Ethan C]

Hi,

> A Linux software packaging and distribution system built from
these: ".app" application bundles. This is, or at least should have
been, a rival to AppImage, the GNOME Flatpak format, and Canonical's
Snap format.

This has never really been viable, since `.app` expects the user to have 
GNUstep installed with a compatible ABI, and GNUstep's ABI has changed 
quite a bit. Additionally, in order to support Objective-C 2.0 and 
introduce more type safety into our runtime than Apple has, our 
Objective-C runtime ABI has also changed quite a bit.

> support for Swift on GNUstep as
well as Obj-C should, IMHO, be a burningly pressing priority for
GNUstep

I believe we were looking into this around 2019, but Swift support 
compatible with existing Swift apps seems extremely nontrivial and would 
require many modifications to the Swift compiler. The Swift compiler is 
also a fast-moving target, and has tons of dependencies such as LLVM. 
It's also hard to build, as I believe it needs to build LLVM from 
source. Maybe we could do it entirely as a Swift library, but I highly 
doubt that this will become compatible with macOS, unless we invest a 
huge amount of effort into this. The easiest way forward on this is 
probably to try to find someone who is currently working on the Swift 
compiler to help us.

> if GNUstep can't target Wayland it will
be history as well

XWayland works, and X11 applications are definitely not going anywhere 
anytime soon. We do not need our own Wayland compositor, as we work 
quite well on KWin, and probably work well on other compositors like 
Mutter and Wayfire too (but I haven't tested those). GNUstep-gui has an 
experimental Wayland backend; I'm not sure what the status of that is.

> A set of what at least 1 of its developers likes to call
"Cocoa-compatible development libraries"

This is what GNUstep is now, at least from what I can see. I guess 
"reimplementation of macOS APIs" might be a bit clearer, but really we 
only support Cocoa and its dependencies, and not a lot else. The fact 
that Apple no longer calls these libraries "Cocoa" is inconsequential 
since Apple seems to have decided that they do not need to document 
Cocoa at all other than random WWDC videos and API references -- 
therefore, all of the documentation about Cocoa is from 2012ish and 
still calls it "Cocoa". There are no recent AppKit tutorials, no AppKit 
manual, no document that a new developer would encounter that teaches 
them to use Cocoa but doesn't call it Cocoa.

On 7/22/24 08:25, Liam Proven wrote:
> Not my project and nothing to do with me. I just thought it might be
> of interest.
>
> https://github.com/phkaeser/wlmaker/tree/main
>
> Why?
>
> Well this is highly relevant to NEXTSPACE and GSDE.
>
> Wayland is not yet ready to replace X11 but it is doing so anyway, right now.
>
> The next version of Fedora will not include X.org by default. Ubuntu
> will follow close behind.
>
> It's happening and it's going.
>
> It has long seemed to me that the GNUstep project and people are in
> denial about what GNUstep is and its future. This is already having
> negative repercussions for the project.
>
> For example the 2 most visible projects to offer replacements for
> Apple macOS do not use GNUstep:
>
> https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/
>
> https://ravynos.com/
>
> (The latter began as a fork of the former but is now going a different way.)
>
> GNUstep, like it or not, is 3 different things:
>
> 1. A set of what at least 1 of its developers likes to call
> "Cocoa-compatible development libraries"
>
> (I think this is unhelpful as Apple no longer uses the "Cocoa" naming.)
>
> 2. A desktop environment for Linux and xBSD built with this tools. I
> know of 2 extant desktop environments built from these: NEXTSPACE and
> GSDE.
>
> 3. A Linux software packaging and distribution system built from
> these: ".app" application bundles. This is, or at least should have
> been, a rival to AppImage, the GNOME Flatpak format, and Canonical's
> Snap format.
>
> At present GNUstep is getting critically dated because Objective-C is
> heading towards obsolescence, replaced by Swift.
>
> https://github.com/swiftlang/swift
>
> Swift is FOSS and cross-platform. It runs on and targets all Apple
> OSes, plus Linux, Android, and Windows, as my colleague wrote:
> https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/30/official_swift_programming_for_windows/
>
> Before better websites or better docs, support for Swift on GNUstep as
> well as Obj-C should, IMHO, be a burningly pressing priority for
> GNUstep, but it does not seem to be.
>
> However, very soon after that, if GNUstep can't target Wayland it will
> be history as well. WLmaker could potentially be a lifeline.
>
> It might let GSDE and NEXTSPACE survive at least.