Re: Minimalist GNUstep possible?

[David Chisnall]

I'm not sure who you have been asking about GNUstep, but they seem to have told 
you a great deal of nonsense.

GNUstep does not, and never has, depended upon packaging things in .app 
bundles.  If you want to produce something using AppKit, then this is the 
easiest way of doing it because it allows you to bundle resources and binaries 
for multiple operating systems and architectures in the same thing.

If you are just using Foundation, then you can create a tool which is just a 
single binary and does not depend on any structure.  GNUstep Make will create 
these for you, or you can use the gnustep-config tool to provide the compiler 
and linker flags to your own build system.

As to producing a minimalist GNUstep, you probably could tweak the make file 
for GNUstep's Foundation (I assume you mean Foundation, not Core Foundation 
when you say Core Foundation, since you talk about NSObject) and remove the 
classes that you don't want.  I'm not sure why you'd bother, as this would just 
save you a few hundred KB of size in one library that you link against and 
maybe a couple of KB in run time memory usage, but GNUstep is LGPL'd so you are 
absolutely free to do this and ship the resulting library with your app if you 
want.

David

On 18 Jun 2010, at 01:24, Jonathan Wolf wrote:

> Hey everybody,
> 
> I have an ObjC library that I built for iPhone development, and
> chances are improving that we will be trying to expand beyond just
> iPhone dev with our toolset, particularly moving to a desktop
> environment. We want to keep using our tools that we've taken a while
> implementing in ObjC, which we feel is a superior language to C++.
> 
> I've played around with GNUstep and the tools, which, honestly look
> really antiquated (but still work obviously), and was finding out that
> there is a reasoning behind the whole App Package experience when
> dealing even with just the core foundation library (especially around
> NSUserDefaults and other "user space" setup options). I was also
> reading various online forums and a large number of posts, written by
> various people, well, they weren't saying very good things about
> GNUstep in general (in fact, their common wordage was "everybody who
> has used it has walked away from it saying 'it's not worth the
> headache'"). I was hoping that things have improved and the experience
> would be different today than it was a few years back.
> 
> The thing is, we're only using a handful of core foundation, which
> includes mainly NSObject, NSMethodInvocation (and related), and
> NSString. We're not using NSUserDefaults or any other form of "App
> Package" needed items, none of the XML parsing or date objects, just a
> really core base to mainly get ObjC up and running (without having to
> inherit directly through Object and lose out on some of the nifties in
> NSObject).
> 
> My question: Is there any way one could rip out just the core
> functionality, or perhaps instead skipping the entire App Package
> process, and just make a minimalist GNUstep, with just the most basic
> of basic functionality, no extra "user space" weight (I'm thinking a
> stand-alone .so/.a library)? Or are the components so intertwined that
> doing so would essentially be the equivalent of trying to rip a jet
> engine out of an F-16?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
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