[sugar] Re: Cocoa and GNUStep,

[Ian Bicking]

(This is probably best discussed on the Sugar list, setting the Reply-To 
to that)

Asko Kauppi wrote:
> 
> I would say it'd be best for you to make a Cairo renderer for it.
> 
> There's tons of other ways, too, but GnuSTEP is not that ready (I might 
> be wrong) and I would estimate it to perform poorly under a 500MHz x86 
> anyways. Moreover, would you need the windowing, dialogs? If not, you 
> can skip the window managing layer and just render your graphics in 
> Cairo. OLPC has that built-in.

I don't think the performance should be very bad; GNUStep isn't 
particularly slow.  The laptop does have windows and a window manager, 
they just don't act like normal windows and window managers.  I think 
the biggest problem would be the storage overhead -- you get GTK 
basically for free, since it is going to be distributed with the base 
system.  Other GNUStep libraries would have to be shipped with the 
activities that use them, which might make them prohibitively large. 
There might also be memory overhead problems -- much of GTK should stay 
in shared memory, and so there won't be a per-activity memory overhead 
for using those libraries.  The GNUStep and Objective C runtime wouldn't 
be shared.  I have no idea how large that runtime is, but it's a serious 
concern.

Most of the special infrastructure of the laptop that Sugar adds will 
(I'm pretty sure) be accessible over dbus.  So that calls for good dbus 
bindings for Objective C -- I'm not sure if those exist.


-- 
Ian Bicking | ianb at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org