Re: Minimalist GNUstep possible?

[Nicolas Roard]

On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 4:33 AM, David Chisnall <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 18 Jun 2010, at 10:16, Jonathan Wolf wrote:
>
>> As a side question that I am sure to be interested in moving into the
>> future, is GNUstep planning on supporting mobile architectures, say
>> like Android? I would really love to keep using a compiled language
>> (like ObjC) on such a platform and be able to take our tools with us
>> onto that end, if we ever go there. Has anybody heard of any luck with
>> any developers going this route? I did notice that there was some work
>> being done on incorporating ObjC into Android, but I'm sure somewhere
>> along that path GNUstep is going to be one of the major players.
>
> I'm not sure about Android specifically, because it uses its 
> lets-reinvent-the-wheel-and-make-it-square windowing system and doesn't seem 
> to like people not living inside their slow VM.  Mobiles like the N900 are 
> definitely of interest to us.  Supporting Android will probably be easier 
> once Cairo has been ported, otherwise we'd have to port the back end to use 
> Skia natively, which is a lot of effort.  For a minimal port, we should be 
> able to use Cairo's OpenGL or image back ends and just write the event 
> handling code (which is nontrivial, but not a huge amount of work).

I agree that it's probably not worth implementing a skia backend, an
OpenGL ES 2.0 backend would make a lot more sense (either directly or
via Cairo). Note that we do ship an NDK for android, that let you
write native code (it's more geared toward implementing bits of your
java app in C/C++ than pure native apps, of course). Not sure how
difficult or not difficult it would be to get ObjC working with the
NDK, but if the runtime is ported on ARM I don't think it would be
very hard to do.

-- 
Nicolas Roard
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound
they make as they fly by." -- Douglas Adams