Is Objective-C portable ?
What do you think of when people ask you this question? Do you feel there are barriers to making your Objective-C programs portable? If you could port a Cocoa program to Windows or Linux easily, would you do it? Would you care if you had to do it on a Windows or Linux machine or would it just rock if you could do it all with Xcode on OS X?
I write programs for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris, and they are all in Objective-C. I am interested in what other people are doing in this field and if this is a field that interests people. Let me know what you think.
2 Comments:
I've only been using Cocoa for about 18 months now -- most of which I don't even get to fire up Xcode, because I'm busy with school and work -- but I feel pretty locked in to OS X. I'm interested in working on projects where the back end is done in a platform-agnostic language, such as Python, and the frontend is done natively using PyGTK, PyObjC, or System.Windows.Forms via IronPython. If I tried harder, I could probably use the Gnustep foundation classes to do all my backend work in Cocoa, and then tie to a given platform's native environment for a frontend. That seems a bit beyond my power, though.
I rhapsodize about the Yellow Box. Cocoa's been the most exciting and interesting development environment I've ever used, and I'd love to get some of that power on other platforms as well.
I completely understand how you feel about Objective-C. It is frustrating to experience how great Objective-C can be, and yet at the same time be locked into the Mac. Languages which have good cross-platform toolkits have much more appeal to the typical programmer (and manager) who must or wants to use more than one platform. I am going to guess that even the true diehard Mac programmer would love to see their code more portable.
GNUStep definitely has a lot of potential, but there are some big downsides as well. The lack of native Windows GUI support, the different development/build environment and the general divergence from Cocoa make it a little less fun than I would like.
Hopefully this will all change soon!
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