Re: Minimalist GNUstep possible?

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,
> Thanks for the reply David,
>
> I apologize for my lack of correct terminology - I did mean just
> Foundation (as in, NSObject, NSDate, etc.) and .app bundles.
>
>    
What point do you have in an .app "bundle" if you do not have the GUI 
app itself and if you want GNUstep to be a ".so"?
> The idea that this is sparked off from is basically how one would take
> ObjC, in a minimalist form, and port it over to another environment -
> equally the same issue if you were to take it from iPhone to desktop
> (say Windows/MinGW) or, probably another avenue to be explored next
> year, iPhone to Android (if estimates of the Android market overtaking
> iPhone stay true).
>    
I think you underestimate the portability and compactness of 
"Foundation" which is what you are looking for.

Foundation is compact, complete and reliable. It runs on a host of 
architectures and little resources. I have it working on a 68040 33MHz 
Motorola... And it runs very well on a MIPS netbook.

The only thing is that its latest incarnation needs fairly modern thread 
stuff, I could use the older release on a 25Mhz Sparcstation with 32MB 
of ram easily! THat means the iPhone or iPad have far more resources!
> Having done years of C++, I've developed quite a hatred for all things
> C++ in nature, and having gone from a strong C++ background to an ObjC
> background, I have been absolutely amazed that it hasn't gotten more
> wide reception. Either rate, I think one of the issues was that ObjC
> was so intertwined to Apple, and GNUstep aims to break that - and this
> is a very good thing imho.
>    
I can understand your hate for C++. It is a shame it is so widespread.
> So I am trying to leverage the Foundation runtime best I can, but in a
> minimalist form as possible - so aiming at a one file .so/.dll is the
> goal really. I think that my original question may be a bit off since
> what I am really interested in trying to make happen is so that going
> through a GORM/GNUmake makefile like system (producing an .app
> bundle), while interesting, is not necessarily the avenue wanting to
> be took - mainly just pushing out a libobjc.so/.dll and
> libnsfoundation.so/.dll would be the most ideal route.
>
>    
Play with "base", which contains foundation, it is most probably more 
than enough. You can also playing with its installation domains, like 
FHS. At the end, a Framework is really a library with a bunch of headers.

Riccardo