Any work I have done has focused solely on getting *something* to work. I've essentially tested if NSString works, and that's about it.
The best way to determine whether something you're interested works is to try it out. I wasn't personally interested in getting more than a proof that it is possible to continue to work on gnustep-base. And it is possible. One can sit down, iterate and contribute upstream. Even that's fantastic news compared to, say, four years ago. You "only" have to deal with a nonstandard libc, nonstandard directory layouts, nonstandard sandboxing approaches and a requirement to interface with Java. You don't have to build your own compiler, deal with a custom build system or (as was the case until recently on certain other platforms) find a way to target a proprietary bytecode VM... I'd say that, similar to any other platform where portability is not proven yet nor guaranteed, it is best to start a project 'from scratch' and work on target ports 'in parallel', adapting to quirks of each in the process. Based on what experience I had with targeting Android in general (and that isn't much), I'd treat porting existing code akin to starting a new port of a game that draws with DirectX and in general shows little consideration for non-Win32 platforms -- one year into the project. It's probably not going to end well (or at least not without many stolen staplers and burning buildings). On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 11:40 AM, Mathias Bauer <[email protected]>wrote: > Hi, > > what is the current status for GNUstep base on Android? > > I did some research and found some activity, but mostly older stuff. > Nowadays one year already is quite old. :-) > > From an external view point I see the following possible problems: > > - as Linux/ARM showed us, exception handling and unwinding on ARM don't > work properly with clang <= 3.4, but that's the clang version used by the > Android NDK; so should we expect similar problems there? > > - I couldn't find reliable information about libdispatch on Android, and > AFAIR Android does not have a fully compliant implemenation of pthreads, so > I'm concerned if the pthread-workingqueue lib (a prerequisite of > libdispatch) works on Android > > - GNUstep base has some prerequisites like libxml2 etc.; I think they all > need to be compiled for Android also > > - I wonder if there is an NSNetServices implementation in GNUstep that > works on Android > > I know that there is apportable.com, but they claim not to use GNUstep > anymore, so this does not give any hints about the feasability of using > GNUstep/libobjc2/libdispatch for porting Objective-C code (at least code > that does not use GUI classes) from iOS to Android. > > Regards, > Mathias > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss-gnustep mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep > -- Ivan Vučica [email protected]
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