GNUstep: Open-source, Object-oriented, Cross-platform Development Environment

http://gnustep.org

by ecliptik • 5 years ago

319 162 5 years ago

gnustep.org

manbart• 5 years ago

How does it compare to Window Maker?

HerrMonnezza• 5 years ago

Window Maker is an X11 window manager with a NeXTStep look.

GNUStep is an attempt at creating a Free/Libre NeXTStep-like environment, including all the apps.

Lammy2• 5 years ago

"The GNUstep project does not provide a window manager; you can use any window manager you want, although we recommend that you use WindowMaker for a better experience." http://gnustep.org/information/aboutGNUstep.html :)

badsectoracula4• 5 years ago

GNUstep is really a framework and closer to something like Gtk+ or Qt. Window Maker is a window manager, it has its own GUI toolkit (WINGs) but it is really only meant for use with Window Maker and perhaps some dockapps (though some dockapps use other toolkits anyway).

lproven9• 5 years ago

It doesn't. They're different types of tools. GNUstep commonly runs under and uses Window Maker.

Window Maker is a window manager.

GNUstep is a large set of libraries and foundation classes, and almost as a byproduct, they happen to implemented most of a desktop environment: a file manager and actual desktop, a dock, plain and rich text editors, a pretty good email client, a chat client, a terminal emulator, image viewer, etc. etc.

But like any other xNix desktop, it needs a window manager. KDE uses kwm, GNOME uses mutter, Xfce uses xfwm, LXDE uses OpenBox, etc. GNUstep can use whatever you want, but Window Maker is the recommended choice because it matches the look-and-feel nicely.

pjmlp8• 5 years ago

It was nice endevour to port NeXTSTEP development stack.

Nowadays with it being several releases behind macOS tooling, and the whole issue of what from Objective-C v-latest is actually supported, it is more of a curiosity and nostalgic experience.

inDigiNeous5• 5 years ago

Yeah this was a really interesting project when it got started, like in the late 90s ? Now, realistically, even though I like the idea, who is going to use this ?

Maybe like a compatibility setup for old NeXTStep applications ? Or porting some old macOS applications to Linux environments ?

Working on top of the X11 implementation also doesn't really provoke trust to look into the project.

pjmlp8• 5 years ago

Yeah, I explicitly mentioned Objective-C v-latest, because not only the users have to figure out the whole runtime support in GCC vs clang in regards to Objective-C 2.0 and GNUStep, to further improve interoperability with Swift, many aren't aware that Objective-C still has a life and gets updates even if in tiny portions.

Finally the whole way how makefiles work (classical NeXTSTEP style) isn't any longer like that.

jabl• 5 years ago

Working on top of the X11 implementation also doesn't really provoke trust to look into the project.

Well, back when this project started X was really the only game in town. If they had started out rewriting the low level display server and graphics drivers they would never have gotten anywhere (to the extent the current state of the project can be considered "anywhere").

grahamlee2• 5 years ago

I co-host a GNUstep developer stream at https://twitch.tv/objcretain (replays at https://replay.objc-retain.com). The motivation my co-host and I have for using GNUstep in 2021 and beyond is to provide a familiar environment for macOS developers and users who are not happy with Apple’s direction and would benefit from a free software alternative. To that end we mostly work on the basic desktop tools like calendar, mail, and addresses, and fix framework/dev tools bugs and missing parts as we find them.

donatj• 5 years ago

Working on top of the X11 implementation also doesn't really provoke trust to look into the project.

Vs Wayland? I'd have way more doubts about anything that ran exclusively on Wayland than on X11.

Wayland isn't ready, I have serious doubts it's ever going to be ready.

X11 is old, but so is vim, emacs, grep, everything I want to actually rely on.

eadmund• 5 years ago

Now, realistically, even though I like the idea, who is going to use this ?

Someone who thinks that OpenStep is a good way to build end-user applications, I imagine. I've never used it myself, but I know that it had an excellent reputation once upon a time. I wouldn't be surprised if it's better than Qt or gtk+.

Working on top of the X11 implementation also doesn't really provoke trust to look into the project.

X11 is the standard display technology for Unix and Unix-like systems. Not working atop X11 would provoke distrust. I imagine that you are actually advocating for Wayland. Wayland may actually be the future, although I am still unconvinced that its design is sound (I worry that it throws out the baby with the bathwater).

edit: I did not realise that there is a Wayland backend for GNUStep.

selfhoster115• 5 years ago

Linux desperately needs a good DE. We might as well dumpster dive for something reusable from the past.

NeXTStep actually really reminds me of Windows 7 and other things. I wouldn't mind trialling it for a week as long as I could get my usual tasks done.

linguae2• 5 years ago

Since roughly 2004 (that's when I first learned about Mac OS X, NeXT, and GNUstep as a high school student), I've been periodically keeping track of the state of GNUstep since I believe there's value in having a FOSS alternative to macOS and its technology. GNUstep could have been the primary GUI development toolkit for the Linux desktop. Unfortunately, GNUstep never caught lightning in the way other FOSS desktop projects did, and I attribute this to bad timing.

My understanding is that when the KDE project started in 1996, GNUstep wasn't ready yet (remember that the OpenStep specification that the original GNUstep was based on was released in 1994), and GTK+ was not separate from GIMP. My understanding is that options for FOSS GUI toolkits were sparse in 1996. What did not help GNUstep's case in 1996 was the fact that NeXT appeared to be dying; nobody in early 1996 would have guessed the outcome of NeXT. Thus, the creator of KDE decided on Qt, which had licensing terms that were not-quite FOSS. This caused consternation among some people in the FOSS community, which lead to the founding of the GNOME desktop. GNOME ended up adopting the now-separated-from-GIMP GTK+ toolkit around 1998. Meanwhile work continued on GNUstep, but by the time 2000 rolled around much of the Linux desktop community rallied behind KDE and GNOME.

Ever since Mac OS X was released, every now and then somebody with Mac OS X and Cocoa experience would look at GNUstep and say, "Wow! I saw what Apple could achieve with NeXT technology; what if we used GNUstep to build something similar for Linux?!" and then get started on a project, only for that person or team to lose momentum and eventually give up. One such promising project that is now dead is Étoilé (http://etoileos.com), which was based on GNUstep and inspired by Mac OS X, yet had ideas of its own, such as versioned objects and support for a dialect of Smalltalk called Pragmatic Smalltalk that leveraged GNUstep's Objective-C APIs. Étoilé would have been a fresh, new Linux desktop experience that would have brought us closer to the dream of a modern "Smalltalk operating system," but unfortunately that project lost momentum, like so many open source projects that don't have corporate backing or massive community support.

There is a really interesting project called helloSystem (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) that is a fork of FreeBSD that aims to re-create the Mac OS X Tiger user experience and conventions. However, this project is built on the Qt toolkit instead of GNUstep.

Will GNUstep ever gain momentum? I don't know; on one hand there is a vocal minority of long-time macOS users who are disappointed with Apple's software direction and would like to have an alternative to macOS that involves the least amount of friction as possible. However, different macOS users like macOS for different reasons. For those who like macOS due to its user interface guidelines and consistency, helloSystem may look promising to them, especially if it gains traction. For those who like macOS due to its object-oriented APIs, they may be interested in taking a look at the .NET ecosystem and the languages it supports.

Personally, I'm dreaming of a Common Lisp desktop heavily influenced by Smalltalk, the Mac, and OpenDoc (Apple's commercially unsuccessful component-based software technology). I remember coming to the realization a few years ago that NEXTSTEP is essentially a pragmatic Smalltalk desktop environment, except instead of running a Smalltalk VM it ran Objective-C and Display PostScript on top of Unix. I'm thinking, why not go all the way with a programmable object-oriented environment and build a desktop environment from the Common Lisp Object System and its meta-programming facilities. It would have a standard set of UI guidelines for user-facing applications, but for power users, because everything is an object, it is possible to combine objects using scripts. If only I had more free time....this would be the ultimate realization of a desktop environment for power users based on taking Xerox PARC's technology to its limits.

MayeulC• 5 years ago

Well, I guess you can still run Emacs on top of Guix :)

I'm being tongue-in-cheek, but Emacs could be considered a graphics toolkit in its own right.

pjmlp8• 5 years ago

My graduation project was porting my supervisor thesis of a particle engine originally developed on a NeXT Cube in Objective-C/OpenGL into Windows/MFC/OpenGL, because it was clear it was going nowhere (OS X wasn't yet announced).

So I actually lived through those events, and also think most modern environments fail short of what desktop computing could have been, and in a twisted way Windows is the closest of them all with COM and .NET, yet the whole WinDev vs DevDiv politics messed even that one, most likely beyond repair in the presence of current UI stack chaos.

laumars• 5 years ago

I was a developer in the 90s and 00s and frankly I thought peoples dislike of Qt was pretty superficial. The problems being that GTK sucked. I’d have forgiven NIH (not invented here) syndrome if GTK was at least as good as Qt but it wasn’t. Frankly I even preferred oldskool Tk over GTK.

In the time frames we are talking about, I also cared very little for NeXT. It did have its fans and deservedly too. But I was banking on BeOS becoming the POSIX workstation of choice. I even preferred that over Linux. But 90s Linux wasn’t exactly a smooth experience like it is today.

These days little has changed my mind about GTK vs Qt.

heresie-dabord• 5 years ago

helloSystem ... fork of FreeBSD ... re-create the Mac OS X Tiger user experience and conventions

There are also a few GNU/Linux distros in this UX category, e.g. Zorin, Elementary, Budgie ... They are listed on https://distrowatch.com/. (I have no association with these distros.) Maybe helloSystem should be added to Distrowatch?

In general, the spirit of Gnome was/is to improve UX (user experience). There have been misadventures shall we say. At this point, I have come to want just a terminal, an editor, and a Web browser. ^_^

[1] https://elementary.io/

[2] https://zorin.com/os/

[3] https://ubuntubudgie.org/

deaddodo• 5 years ago

It is even more of a shame, since Etoile was the project to bring frontend WM and library synchronicity to Linux / macOS (then OS X). But it died and hasn’t been updated in ages, as the last great hurrah in that effort.

apple4ever7• 5 years ago

Which of course it doesn't have to be, but the current developers are very hostile to changing anything about the UI, which of course no one today really wants. Providing the old UI as theme for those who want it is fine, but not updating it to something modern and useful is not.

I really wanted to contribute and help out with GNUstep, but that put me off from attempting anything.

gcasa18• 5 years ago

Do I know you? We really are pretty nice. GNUstep can be themed very easily. You are more than welcome to help, ESPECIALLY to make more themes.

See the link below... This is GNUstep using the rik theme... Just one of the many ways the project can look:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/12986802/33520300-...

Gregory Casamento GNUstep Maintainer

gcasa18• 5 years ago

NeXTSTEP? That's how it started, but not where it currently is. GNUstep is currently pushing for 10.15 compatibility at least. GNUstep supports the current release of clang which is fully ObjC2 compliant. GCC is also still supported. There is also a tool called buildtool and a library which can read and build xcodeproj files fairly seamlessly.

pjmlp8• 5 years ago

Objective-C moved on, nowadays is it more 2.x than 2.0, and those small changes are not there as far as I am aware.

xyproto• 5 years ago

What are the advantages over FPC/Lazarus?

gattilorenz2• 5 years ago

- First and foremost, it's not Pascal, but the more elegant Objective-C.

- You can in theory compile sources for NeXT/OpenSTEP or early OS X applications with minimal changes[1], while FPC would require you to rewrite them completely.

- Different GUI components, inspired/based on the *STEP design.

Realistically, I guess you're better off using Lazarus for anything new, nowadays.

[1] The original DOOM editor was developed for NeXT machines, and the sources surfaced a few years ago. Here it is running under Ubuntu with Window Maker and GNUStep: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/111229-redoomed-maclin...

badsectoracula4• 5 years ago

First and foremost, it's not Pascal, but the more elegant Objective-C.

That depends on the beholder and their eye :-P.

KronisLV6• 5 years ago

Typo in the banner: http://gnustep.org/information/banner.pdf

GNUstep uses the same langauge and API as Cocoa on Mac OS X.

That small nitpick aside, that seems like and interesting project! I don't think i have seen many (if any) other attempts at creating a set of portable tools like that, entire workspaces that can work over a variety of OSes, unless i'm reading this wrong. Sure, we have portable editors and so on, but this seems like a step well above that.

mhoad3• 5 years ago

I’d say that Flutter[1] probably meets that same definition today of cross platform development and tooling in a much slicker way.

[1] https://flutter.dev/

KronisLV6• 5 years ago

I'm afraid that i can't agree there, because of how it was implemented.

Flutter is plain hostile from certain standpoints: in the browser, it does use canvas for rendering and therefore denies any ability to learn about how a particular site was developed (how many of today's devs have benefited from "Inspect Element"?). Not only that, but it also breaks much of browser functionality, such as right clicking, selecting text, using plugins that manipulate the DOM, user styles, and historically even screen readers (though they're getting better at that last bit recently).

Just have a look here: https://gallery.flutter.dev

Open the Reply app, open a message, try copying the contents. Try seeing how the block with the sender information has been formatted. Pretend that Taxes folder is spam instead (e.g. an ad, or a flashing element that could cause you seizures), try blocking it with uBlock Origin or a similar plugin.

I agree that technically it fits the criteria that you're describing, but it fails on certain platforms (the web) in my eyes due to all of the shortcomings and how badly it implements this platform support. Use it for native apps? Sure, i guess...

jksmith• 5 years ago

Freepascal/Lazarus

KronisLV6• 5 years ago

Lazarus and the modern versions of Pascal are lovely for desktop development!

For anyone curious, here's a nice writeup: https://castle-engine.io/modern_pascal_introduction.html

And here's Lazarus, the actual IDE: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Though they're more along the lines of cross platform language/framework (their approach to GUI frameworks across platforms is great https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Component_Library#/med...), as opposed to a set of utilities to develop inside of.

Edit: for example, see http://www.gnustep.org/softwareindex/index.php?count=100

Either way, it's a shame that Lazarus and Pascal never really caught on, since they feel like an older and more mature Go or something, except with actual GUI tools out of the box and a variety of useful drivers (think along the lines of Swing in Java, but less rude to the underlying platforms), which mostly makes them dead nowadays and not the best option for new projects.

Also, their web dev scene is lacking, there's nothing like Spring/Django/Express.net/ASP.NET in Lazarus. At least not "one true framework" to do webdev in.

sadfev• 5 years ago

It’s dead and has been for a decade

mpweiher• 5 years ago

That turns out not to be the case. It is in both active development and use.

lproven9• 5 years ago

There is slow but active development. Occasionally new releases appear. There is a new, active distro under development.

I don't think this fits the definition of "dead". Not very lively, but not dead.

gcasa18• 5 years ago

Then join us. Help us get it the last mile. Don't just say "it looks like it's dead".. be part of the solution. :) You are more than welcome to join!

-- Gregory Casamento GNUstep Lead Maintainer

selfhoster115• 5 years ago

Software dies with its last user or curious historian. Open step is quite far from that.

gcasa18• 5 years ago

Not dead at all. I have been working with a number of companies to help them use it. Surprising definition of dead. ;) Join us, be part of the solution!

GC -- GNUstep Lead

shrubble• 5 years ago

The most recent development (updated a month ago) is 'NEXTSPACE' which is designed to sit on top of a minimal CentOS 7 install.

See: github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

I have used it in a VM under Windows and it was pretty nice.

It felt very NeXT-ish.

Of course you could install and run regular X windows programs as well.

mongol• 5 years ago

I remember GNUstep since the 90s. It existed even before Gnome. It had a (for the time) pretty home page, but very little information and very little outward progress. What happened behind the scenes I have no idea about.

gcasa18• 5 years ago

Still going. ;) -- Gregory Casamento GNUstep Lead Maintainer

pulse7• 5 years ago

Who remembers the Smalltalk browser?

ChrisMarshallNY2• 5 years ago

As an Apple dev since ‘86, I’ve used (in order of appearance):

    MPW

    THINK Pascal

    THINK C

    CodeWarrior

    Xcode

I never warmed to other IDEs (like AppCode), but find IDEs to be more productive (for me) than CLI tools. Yeah, I know some fairly awesome CLI people, but that has never been the case for me.

I write in native Swift, so it’s really important that what I use be right on the “cutting edge.”

Right now, that’s Xcode.

Xcode is a bug farm. It’s also frikkin’ huge. I have to sometimes force-restart when the code parser goes walkabout.

But it does give me what I need. I’d certainly be open to viable alternatives, but nothing has come up that has enticed me.

ternaryoperator2• 5 years ago

Xcode is a bug farm. It’s also frikkin’ huge. I have to sometimes force-restart when the code parser goes walkabout.

Have a look at JetBrains CLion with the Swift plugin. It has served me well.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 5 years ago

Have a look at JetBrains CLion with the Swift plugin. It has served me well.

Thanks.

oefrha2• 5 years ago

The last time I evaluated a small, supposedly cross-platform framework which uses GNUstep for macOS, I quickly realized there’s no obvious or even documented way to install the development libraries on macOS: there’s no Homebrew formula, a broken MacPorts port that was last updated ages ago (I’m not sure if it includes the development libraries or just a desktop suite), and some ancient, partial instructions on the wiki. I guess the only way to install it is to grab the source and try to get it to build, but everything about it screams “don’t use”.

accountofme• 5 years ago

I am not a mac developer, but if GNUstep is trying to keep to being source compatible with cocoa as possible, do you need to? Shouldn't the Apple provided dev libraries work too?

I could be missing something, and most probably am, but I looked into rust bindings for this library and they had build options to use gnustep/libobjc with macos and linux.

Hope that helps.

edit: here is the crate I am talking about: https://crates.io/crates/objc-sys

oefrha2• 5 years ago

You're certainly not going to be able to -lgnustep-base -lgnustep-gui on macOS without installing libgnustep-base and libgnustep-gui. You should be able to link against libobjc without GNUstep.

I'm not sure if Cocoa has diverged enough to be incompatible.

ksherlock• 5 years ago

The OpenStep specification is from October 1994. For perspective, the first version of Netscape navigator was in December of 1994 (and the first version of Internet Explorer was in August 1995). Now picture yourself in 2022, building a modern web page, testing with Firefox 100 and expecting it to work with Netscape 1.0

soraminazuki3• 5 years ago

WINE doesn't seem to be packaged in Scoop, MSYS2, or Chocolatey. Yet none of that would be a dealbreaker when using WINE.

A quick search reveals that GNUStep is packaged in Debian, Fedora, NixOS, OpenSUSE, Arch, Gentoo, Void, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and more [1]. I think that should be enough to cover most platforms that people would actually want to use GNUStep on.

[1] https://repology.org/project/gnustep-base/versions

bogwog2• 5 years ago

GNUstep is not WINE for Mac/NEXTstep (Darling is tho: https://www.darlinghq.org/)

Why would you want to use GNUstep on Mac? Because it lets you write native software using Foundation/Cocoa/etc that you can actually port to other platforms.

einpoklum• 5 years ago

I remember seeing GNUstep on Linux distributions 20 years ago, along with early KDE and other options. I appreciated the aesthetics of it at the time, but - can someone explain its benefits today, and why one would prefer using it?

Actually, I'm not even clear what I would replace with GNUstep, exactly.

rbanffy• 5 years ago

I imagine you can compile some programs designed to run under macOS to run on it, with a NeXTSTEP look and feel.

Apart from that, it's mostly for historical interest.

touggourt• 5 years ago

GNUStep is not a desktop. Try NextSpace (see above) if you want a GNUStep based desktop. NextSpace is a clone of NextStep desktop.

Like its ancestor, NextSpace is fast, light and very consistent. I like the vertical menus that I can move were I need them, the dock in the file manager, the file manager itself, … It is an advanced desktop that hide the difficulties: you don't need to learn, it is logical. It is like macOS, without targeting beginners. I am a long time KDE user, I know how it works, it is my desktop of choice. But there is still some glitches, and it is a different user experience than NextSpace.

major5052• 5 years ago

So, is like windowmaker?I kind feel like when I was in college in the early 2000`s and used Windowmaker as my main window manager.

badsectoracula4• 5 years ago

GNUstep is a framework (and some applications that use that framework), it is closer to Gtk+ and Qt than to KDE or GNOME. Most importantly it does not provide any window manager and instead rely on an existing one (you can use it with KWin/KDE, Mutter/Gnome, XFWM/XFCE or any other window manager).

Window Maker is a window manager with a NeXTSTEP/OpenStep style, though it has nothing to do with GNUstep aside from looking very similar and thus being a good choice for when using GNUstep programs with the classic NeXTSTEP/OpenStep theme.

lproven9• 5 years ago

I tried to answer this above:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29544763

major5052• 5 years ago

Thanks. It cleared a lot!

mukundesh• 5 years ago

Wondering how Steve Jobs would have reacted to GNUstep...

necovek• 5 years ago

He wouldn't react at all: GNUstep was already an established project before his death, so he already had an opportunity to react and, unsurprisingly, he didn't care much.

shp0ngle2• 5 years ago

Apple didn't really like OpenDarwin or whatever was the name, right. But more on trademark concerns, if I'm not wrong.

lizknope2• 5 years ago

GNUstep started in 1995 back when Jobs was still at NeXT before Apple bought the company. He didn't try to stop it back then.

lloydatkinson4• 5 years ago

It looks like it's straight out of 1995. Ultra dark gray and ugly aesthetics, despite what some people say, will not attract developers or users. This seems to be a meme, Linux desktops and apps with zero thought given to UX and UI. In some cases it almost seems like the approach of "how can we make this as cluttered, messy, and ugly as possible" to look at.

selfhoster115• 5 years ago

1995 GUIs have far more usability left in them them modern UIs. Just the fact that MS thought it's acceptable to dumb down the right click menu (!), aka the most prominent symbol of a power user, is telling.

We need to step back to 1990s/early 2000s, steal a few modern UI innovations that make sense while retreating, and take a long and hard look at the kind of GUIs we want to see built around ourselves.

lloydatkinson4• 5 years ago

A GUI can follow 1995 principles without being an oppressive grey and ugly icons and either too much or too little spacing.

udbhavs• 5 years ago

Yes, I'm no fan of the modern Metro UI either (Settings is the worse offender) but I personally believe Explorer in Win10 is peak windows design. Minimalist but with vibrant colorful icons, neatly organized but still information dense and no abuse of whitespace. It's a shame the entire Windows UI can't be based around it.

shp0ngle2• 5 years ago

Last time I looked, GNUStep was really, really, really buggy reimplementation of 2000-era macOS... sorry, Mac OS X back then... toolkit.

I say really 3 times, because I really tried to port a MacOS-only terminal app (don't ask) to Linux, and I failed miserably on very basic functions.

I guess I should have tried more, make minimal examples and report that, but I never bothered. It's what I would do now, anyway.

zwaps• 5 years ago

"GNUstep is a free, object-oriented, cross-platform development environment that strives for [...] elegance"

Well personally, I gotta say, I dig the 1995 optics of this.

gcasa18• 5 years ago

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/12986802/33520300-...

Yeah, I know, right? ;) </sarcasm> It is fully capable of looking like macosx using any number of themes.

Gregory Casamento -- GNUstep Lead

bluedino2• 5 years ago

25 years ago I was excited to learn that the Quake editor (and Doom before that) was written on NeXT. I figured with my rudimentary Linux and C skills I could get it working, but of course it was a little harder than installing everything and running make

From JohnC:

"This is a NEXTSTEP application, so hardly anyone is going to be able to use the code as is. This is not an OPENSTEP application. It doesn't even use the foundation kit, so porting to gnustep or openstep-solaris/mach/nt would not be trivial."

"This application was really not a very good fit for NEXTSTEP. The display postscript model fundamentally doesn't fit very well with what we need here -- if you run in an 8 bit color mode, the line drawing runs at an ok speed, but the texture view goes half the speed it should as it dithers from 24 bit color down to 8 bit. If you run in 24 bit color mode, you get less screen real estate and significantly slower line drawing as a 3 megabyte XY view is flushed. Sigh. If anyone does actually run this on NEXTSTEP be advised that you want a fast machine."

"QuakeEd is written for NEXTSTEP 3.3, while GnuStep is an implementation of the OPENSTEP spec. I haven't had time to port it to openstep yet, but it looks like it will take a little effort. NeXT has tools in NS 4.0 to help, but it still isn't automatic."

unixhero• 5 years ago

An ultimate Hacker News comment here; John Carmack, Quake/Doom anecdotes, relevant ties to NeXT.

Just saying, greatly enjoyed it.

bitwize2• 5 years ago

Still missing Rust, blockchain, and gut bacteria but it's not bad!

lizknope2• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure that Carmack was running NeXTSTEP 3.3 on an HP PA-RISC machine.

NeXTSTEP ran on m68, x86, SPARC, and PA-RISC. Then it was ported to PowerPC and renamed.

https://wiki.c2.com/?NextStep

bluedino2• 5 years ago

Yup - from another .plan file:

We hadn’t really used them for much of anything in the past year, so it was just easier to turn them off than to continue to administer them. Most of the intel systems had already been converted to NT or 95, and Onethumb gets all of our old black NeXT hardware, but we have four nice HP 712/80 workstations that can’t be used for much of anything. If someone can put these systems to good use (a dallas area unix hacker), you can have them for free. As soon as they are spoken for, I will update my .plan, so check immediately before sending me email.

You have to come by our office (in Mesquite) and do a fresh OS install here before you can take one. There may still be junk on the HD, and I can’t spend the time to clean them myself. You can run either NEXTSTEP 3.3 or HP/UX. These are NOT intel machines, so you can’t run dos or windows. I have NS CD’s here, but I can’t find the original HP/UX CDs. Bring your own if that’s what you want.

I’m a bit nostalgic about the NeXT systems – the story in the Id Anthology is absolutely true: I walked through a mile of snow to the bank to pay for our first workstation. For several years, I considered it the best development environment around. It still has advantages today, but you can’t do any accelerated 3D work on it.

aklemm2• 5 years ago

Is it strictly necessary that it be ugly?

pelagicAustral• 5 years ago

I think it looks amazing. I wish I could work on an UI like that all the time... Not long ago I was working at an office (non-IT stuff) and they had these very old computers, still running Windows 7, and I remember being able to enable the Win 98 theme, I was so happy about that... at home I was running Windows 10, where you can no longer give your desktop that ancient feel...

I'd say Windows 95/98 was peak UI design. This UI feels even better...

aklemm2• 5 years ago

Ok, if there are enough people sharing that opinion, then I certainly get it.

lproven9• 5 years ago

You know that NeXTstep is the only GUI that was pretty enough to feature in a music video?

It's in Madonna's _Rain_ (1993 I think). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15kWlTrpt5k

The NeXT cube also featured in _Flatliners_. http://www.starringthecomputer.com/feature.html?f=398

mucholove3• 5 years ago

So I use GNUstep and I really like it.

It is not an Apple emulator—it is an OPENstep emulator and so it implements the amazing Cocoa API and many mac/iOS frameworks can be used server side with minimal porting.

This makes it easy for what I intend to keep as a one person project forever or as long as Apple continues to support Objective-C.

You want to know an unpopular opinion?? I love Objective-C and I think it is better—way better than Swift. And—if you have discipline, the preprocessor is excellent.

So while many might say GNUstep is buggy, it is working for several of us—and happily so.

I do agree that the homepage is terrible and that what should be done is put some installer scripts so you can start using it immediately. An Ubuntu installation following the corresponding script here is foolproof: https://github.com/plaurent/gnustep-build

Check it out!!

anonymouse0082• 5 years ago

You want to know an unpopular opinion?? I love Objective-C and I think it is better—way better than Swift. And—if you have discipline, the preprocessor is excellent.

Very curious to the reasoning here. If you can get to the pointer level of Swift, you basically have obj-c without all the unnecessary syntax?

In my view, excessive syntax is a crutch to make the language parser's job easier, not making the thought to code job easier. Obj-C seems to suffer from the excessive syntax?

OnlyMortal• 5 years ago

To be fair, the syntax has changed since the days of NeXT. Accessing object variables been more C like (dot notation).

Personally, I never had any difficulties understanding the old syntax.

pianoben3• 5 years ago

In my view, excessive syntax is a crutch to make the language parser's job easier, not making the thought to code job easier. Obj-C seems to suffer from the excessive syntax?

Another perspective is that the syntax of Obj-C exposes and supports the core model of the language, which is objects sending messages to each other. That it happens to be fast to parse seems secondary, and certainly further developments since version 2.0 have made parsing slower, not faster.

In my experience people complain about Obj-C syntax when what they actually dislike are verbose Cocoa/Foundation/etc APIs. Try their C Core* equivalents and you'll find you probably dislike those, too.

apple4ever7• 5 years ago

I love the expressiveness of Obj-C, I love the brackets, and I love how easy it is to write.

I hate Swifts boiler plate words (var, let [why not const???], func), I hate the obtuseness of it (eg question marks everywhere), and I hate how hard it is to read because it makes it very easy to be so "clever".

apple4ever7• 5 years ago

I love Objective-C and I think it is better—way better than Swift.

You are not the only one. This is exactly how I feel.

But GNUstep is ... not great. I want it to be! But it needs a lot of work on the interface side.

occoder3• 5 years ago

Judging by your comments, you seemed to have talked to the GNUstep maintainers, but they haven't been receptive to your ideas.

May I propose a fork? How about SiDESTEP ® for the project name?

gcasa18• 5 years ago

Email me... anyone is free to join at any time. The whole project would appreciate the help.

gcasa18• 5 years ago

Well, for one thing it's not an emulator... AT ALL. And for another thing the idea behind GNUstep since about 2000 has been to implement Cocoa. I do appreciate your enthusiasm. :)

Greg C. GNUstep Maintainer

pakl• 5 years ago

A few of us maintain scripts for building the latest GNUstep from source under Linux (desktop, PinePhone, and Raspberry Pi) here: https://github.com/plaurent/gnustep-build

apple4ever7• 5 years ago

Thank you for this! I was the a maintainer for this years ago, and I'm glad its way better than I had it.

phkahler• 5 years ago

Can it be used as a GUI for C++ programs?

Does it support OpenGL ES?

gcasa18• 5 years ago

Yes, it can and yes it does.

-- Gregory Casamento GNUstep Lead Maintainer

naves• 5 years ago

For a while, GNUSTEP Live CD was the best option to try and test GNUstep. Latest version is even available for Raspberry Pi: http://www.aiei.ch/gnustep/

GNUstep: Open-source, Object-oriented, Cross-platform Development Environment

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