Ian Bicking wrote:
(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.
Calling external C libraries from Objective C is no more difficult than
from C++ so bindings aren't really needed unless you want a nice Objc OO
wrapper around them.
Also see:
http://www.gnustep.it/Renaissance/
http://www.cocotron.org/Info/
That said, I would tend to agree with Asko.
Especially if you are re-implementing an existing application it would
most probably be a lot less work and radically less resource intensive
to port the viewer component over to Cairo and C (or even Python) than
trying to get the objc + cocoa code to run under the laptop.
/me burns an incense stick for the continuing fall of solid state memory
prices.
- antoine
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