[cw-discuss] Strange

[James Richard Tyrer]

Richard Lemay wrote:
> However, given the state of Wine that is
> quite advanced, I tend to think the Win32 applications will come sooner 
> that the Mac Application.

WINE had to try to reverse engineer the whole thing.  I don't know how 
close gnuSTEP is to being able to run current Cocoa applications.  At 
sometime in the recent past, they were virtually identical.

IIUC, on the day that Apple purchased NeXT, the gnuSTEP implementation 
of the OPENSTEP specification had the same API and was capable of 
running NeXT applications.

They are still similar enough that the same source code can be built to 
run on either the current OS/X-Cocoa or gnuSTEP running on Linux.

gnuSTEP continues development to try to track new features of Cocoa.

GnuSTEP was not intended as a means of running commercial OS/X packages 
on Linux -- probably because Apple was using the POWER-PC -- but rather 
a means to port NeXT applications to other *NIX platforms.  WINE also 
has a project to do that -- to port MS-Windows applications to *NIX.

I don't know how much work would be required to add the capability of 
running commercial binary packages for OS/X on other *NIX platforms 
using gnuSTEP but it appears to me that most of the work has been done.

-- 
JRT