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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 i

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 https://repology.org/project/gnustep-base/versions

bogwog 5y ago
GNUstep is not WINE for Mac/NEXTstep (Darling is tho: https://www.darlinghq.org/ 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.
- soraminazuki 5y ago
  The analogy still holds because people wouldn't use GNUStep on macOS for the same reason people wouldn't use WINE on Windows. That GNUStep doesn't run macOS binaries makes no difference here.
  - bogwog 5y ago
    They would use it though, that’s my point. A developer that wants to create a portable Cocoa-based GUI, or a Foundation-based Objective-C CLI can use GNUstep to do so. If they just use Apple’s frameworks directly, they’ll have a hard time porting it anywhere.
    - spijdar 5y ago
      The one cross-platform app I know that uses GNUstep to run on Linux is Hopper, which just uses Apple's libraries on Mac. Not sure how hard the porting effort was, but I thought I'd throw that anecdote in there. As for wine, it's worth pointing out that wine consists of both the plumbing to get win32 apps running on Linux as well as a recreation of the win32 userland libraries. Darling is similar, and it uses GNUstep for some of its userland recreation. Ideally, GNUstep should be a drop in, source compatible framework to compile code written for the native ones on MacOS, similar to how Wine can be a source compatible framework for Windows. There are actually Wine ports to CPU architectures like 64 bit PowerPC that never had native windows versions, and Wine lets you recompile and run win32 software on ppc64le. (Of course, the practical caveat is GNUstep isn't implementing OS X's API, but OpenSTEP, which OS X/MacOS still mostly (?) implements as a subset of its current API. So, if you wanted to be cross platform and use GNUstep, you'd either need to develop on Linux, link against GNUstep on MacOS, or be super familiar with MacOS to know what APIs are available on both)
    - soraminazuki 5y ago
      I think it's more common practice to use Apple's frameworks on macOS and GNUStep on Linux. At least, that's what unar [1] and the Hopper Disassembler [2][3] does. That's probably the reason why GNUStep is absent in Homebrew. [1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/1cfd83e859002d1f053bb3abdee5cfa8aae95493/pkgs/tools/archivers/unar/default.nix#L46-L47 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/1cfd83e859002d1f053bb3... [2]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/a0dbe47318bbab7559ffbfa7c4872a517833409f/pkgs/development/tools/analysis/hopper/default.nix#L35 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/a0dbe47318bbab7559ffbf... [3]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/a0dbe47318bbab7559ffbfa7c4872a517833409f/pkgs/development/tools/analysis/hopper/default.nix#L78 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/a0dbe47318bbab7559ffbf...

bogwog 5y ago

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

soraminazuki 5y ago
The analogy still holds because people wouldn't use GNUStep on macOS for the same reason people wouldn't use WINE on Windows. That GNUStep doesn't run macOS binaries makes no difference here.
- bogwog 5y ago
  They would use it though, that’s my point. A developer that wants to create a portable Cocoa-based GUI, or a Foundation-based Objective-C CLI can use GNUstep to do so. If they just use Apple’s frameworks directly, they’ll have a hard time porting it anywhere.
  - spijdar 5y ago
    The one cross-platform app I know that uses GNUstep to run on Linux is Hopper, which just uses Apple's libraries on Mac. Not sure how hard the porting effort was, but I thought I'd throw that anecdote in there. As for wine, it's worth pointing out that wine consists of both the plumbing to get win32 apps running on Linux as well as a recreation of the win32 userland libraries. Darling is similar, and it uses GNUstep for some of its userland recreation. Ideally, GNUstep should be a drop in, source compatible framework to compile code written for the native ones on MacOS, similar to how Wine can be a source compatible framework for Windows. There are actually Wine ports to CPU architectures like 64 bit PowerPC that never had native windows versions, and Wine lets you recompile and run win32 software on ppc64le. (Of course, the practical caveat is GNUstep isn't implementing OS X's API, but OpenSTEP, which OS X/MacOS still mostly (?) implements as a subset of its current API. So, if you wanted to be cross platform and use GNUstep, you'd either need to develop on Linux, link against GNUstep on MacOS, or be super familiar with MacOS to know what APIs are available on both)
  - soraminazuki 5y ago
    I think it's more common practice to use Apple's frameworks on macOS and GNUStep on Linux. At least, that's what unar [1] and the Hopper Disassembler [2][3] does. That's probably the reason why GNUStep is absent in Homebrew. [1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/1cfd83e859002d1f053bb3abdee5cfa8aae95493/pkgs/tools/archivers/unar/default.nix#L46-L47 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/1cfd83e859002d1f053bb3... [2]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/a0dbe47318bbab7559ffbfa7c4872a517833409f/pkgs/development/tools/analysis/hopper/default.nix#L35 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/a0dbe47318bbab7559ffbf... [3]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/a0dbe47318bbab7559ffbfa7c4872a517833409f/pkgs/development/tools/analysis/hopper/default.nix#L78 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/a0dbe47318bbab7559ffbf...