Re: Windows GNUstep interface to C#.NET

[David Chisnall]

On 23 Nov 2016, at 01:49, Giah de Barag <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> David, thank you also for the info about WinObjc. Is Microsoft contributing 
> their improvements back into GNUstep, libobjc, clang, lldb, etc., or have 
> they released the source of their libobjc-WinRT bridge?

They’re contributing back their libobjc changes and their libobjc-WinRT 
integration stuff is all in the WinObjC GitHub repo (as are all of their 
libobjc changes).  

Currently, I’d recommend using their version on Windows: some of their changes 
are a bit too ugly to merge as-is - they’re working on tidying them, but until 
either they or I do they have a few Windows-specific feature and bug fixes that 
are relevant.  In particular, they have a really ugly work-around for the fact 
that the Windows DLL model doesn’t let you sensibly do pointer comparison to 
detect the block classes in various places.

They are upstreaming clang changes, though most of their work has been on 
getting the Visual Studio compiler to work properly.  It’s probably a better 
bet at the moment, as it provides good interop with C++ exceptions (clang still 
lags a bit here - some Google and MS folk are working on improving it).

They’re now largely refocussed on getting various middleware libraries that iOS 
developers like to work with applications that use Windows UI APIs, so there’s 
a lot of scope for using GNUstep in cooperation with their stuff. Their 
Foundation is a lot less mature than GNUstep and their CoreFoundation is very 
similar in design to CoreBase (fairly simple wrapper over Foundation) and they 
have no AppKit.

David