GNUstep

Last updated
GNUstep
Developer(s) GNUstep Developers
Stable release
make 2.9.0, base 1.28.0, gui 0.29.0, back 0.29.0 / May 6, 2021;2 years ago (2021-05-06)
Preview release
only in the SVN software repository
Repository
Written in Objective-C
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Widget toolkit
License GNU General Public License for the applications
GNU Lesser General Public License for the libraries.
Website gnustep.github.io

GNUstep is a free software implementation of the Cocoa (formerly OpenStep) Objective-C frameworks, widget toolkit, and application development tools for Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows. It is part of the GNU Project.

Contents

GNUstep features a cross-platform, object-oriented IDE. Apart from the default Objective-C interface, GNUstep also has bindings for Java, Ruby, [2] GNU Guile and Scheme. [3] The GNUstep developers track some additions to Apple's Cocoa to remain compatible. The roots of the GNUstep application interface are the same as the roots of Cocoa: NeXTSTEP and OpenStep. GNUstep thus predates Cocoa, which emerged when Apple acquired NeXT's technology and incorporated it into the development of the original Mac OS X, while GNUstep was initially an effort by GNU developers to replicate the technically ambitious NeXTSTEP's programmer-friendly features.

History

GNUstep began when Paul Kunz and others at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center wanted to port HippoDraw from NeXTSTEP to another platform. Instead of rewriting HippoDraw from scratch and reusing only the application design, they decided to rewrite the NeXTSTEP object layer on which the application depended. This was the first version of libobjcX. It enabled them to port HippoDraw to Unix systems running the X Window System without changing a single line of their application source. After the OpenStep specification was released to the public in 1994, they decided to write a new objcX which would adhere to the new APIs. The software would become known as "GNUstep". [4]

Software architecture

Illustrates software components of the Linux desktop stack like the display server, graphics control element libraries or graphical shells. Free and open-source-software display servers and UI toolkits.svg
Illustrates software components of the Linux desktop stack like the display server, graphics control element libraries or graphical shells.

Rendering

GNUstep contains a set of graphical control elements written in the Objective-C programming language.

The graphical user interface (GUI) of GNUMail is composed of graphics control elements. GNUMail has to interact with the windowing system, e.g. X11 or Wayland, and its graphical user interface has to be rendered. GNUstep's backend provides a small set of functions used by the user interface library to interface to the actual windowing system. It also has a rendering engine which emulates common Postscript functions. The package gnustep-back provides the following backends:

Paradigms

GNUstep inherits some design principles proposed in OPENSTEP (GNUstep predates Cocoa, but Cocoa is based on OPENSTEP) as well as the Objective-C language.

Other interfaces

In addition to the Objective-C interface, some small projects under the GNUstep umbrella implement other APIs from Apple:

As of February 2020, there are no projects that build the Swift programming language against the GNUstep Objective-C environment.

Applications

Here are some examples of applications written for or ported to GNUstep. [8]

Written from scratch

Ported from NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, or macOS

Forks of GNUstep

Class capabilities

Foundation Kit

The Foundation Kit provides basic classes such as wrapper classes and data structure classes.

Application Kit

The Application Kit provides classes oriented around graphical user interface capabilities.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NeXTSTEP</span> Operating system from NeXT Computer

NeXTSTEP is a discontinued object-oriented, multitasking operating system based on the Mach kernel and the UNIX-derived BSD. It was developed by NeXT Computer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was initially used for its range of proprietary workstation computers such as the NeXTcube. It was later ported to several other computer architectures.

Darwin is the core Unix operating system of macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, iPadOS, visionOS, and bridgeOS. It previously existed as an independent open-source operating system, first released by Apple Inc. in 2000. It is composed of code derived from NeXTSTEP, BSD, Mach, and other free software projects' code, as well as code developed by Apple.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenStep</span> Defunct object-oriented application programming interface specification

OpenStep is a defunct object-oriented application programming interface (API) specification for a legacy object-oriented operating system, with the basic goal of offering a NeXTSTEP-like environment on non-NeXTSTEP operating systems. OpenStep was principally developed by NeXT with Sun Microsystems, to allow advanced application development on Sun's operating systems, specifically Solaris. NeXT produced a version of OpenStep for its own Mach-based Unix, stylized as OPENSTEP, as well as a version for Windows NT. The software libraries that shipped with OPENSTEP are a superset of the original OpenStep specification, including many features from the original NeXTSTEP.

Cocoa is Apple's native object-oriented application programming interface (API) for its desktop operating system macOS.

Carbon was one of two primary C-based application programming interfaces (APIs) developed by Apple for the macOS operating system. Carbon provided a good degree of backward compatibility for programs that ran on Mac OS 8 and 9. Developers could use the Carbon APIs to port (“carbonize”) their “classic” Mac applications and software to the Mac OS X platform with little effort, compared to porting the app to the entirely different Cocoa system, which originated in OPENSTEP. With the release of macOS 10.15 Catalina, the Carbon API was officially discontinued and removed, leaving Cocoa as the sole primary API for developing macOS applications.

Portable Distributed Objects (PDO) is an application programming interface (API) for creating object-oriented code that can be executed remotely on a network of computers. It was created by NeXT Computer, Inc. using their OpenStep system, whose use of Objective-C made the package very easy to write. It was characterized by its very light weight and high speed in comparison to similar systems such as CORBA.

An object-oriented operating system is an operating system that is designed, structured, and operated using object-oriented programming principles.

The Foundation Kit, or just Foundation for short, is an Objective-C framework in the OpenStep specification. It provides basic classes such as wrapper classes and data structure classes. This framework uses the prefix NS. It is also part of Cocoa and of the Swift standard library.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Window Maker</span>

Window Maker is a free and open-source window manager for the X Window System, allowing graphical applications to be run on Unix-like operating-systems. It is designed to emulate NeXTSTEP's GUI as an OpenStep-compatible environment. Window Maker is part of the GNU Project.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scanner Access Now Easy</span>

Scanner Access Now Easy (SANE) is an open-source application programming interface (API) that provides standardized access to any raster image scanner hardware. The SANE API is public domain. It is commonly used on Linux.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rhapsody (operating system)</span> Apple operating system

Rhapsody is an operating system that was developed by Apple Computer after its purchase of NeXT in the late 1990s. It is the fifth major release of the Mach-based operating system that was developed at NeXT in the late 1980s, previously called OPENSTEP and NEXTSTEP. Rhapsody was targeted to developers for a transition period between the Classic Mac OS and Mac OS X. Rhapsody represented a new and exploratory strategy for Apple, more than an operating system, and runs on x86-based PCs and on Power Macintosh.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gorm (computing)</span> Open source interface builder software

Gorm is a graphical user interface builder application. It is part of the developer tools of GNUstep. Gorm is the equivalent of Interface Builder that was originally found on NeXTSTEP, then OPENSTEP, and finally on Mac OS X. It supports the old .nib files as well as its own .gorm file format.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AppKit</span> Graphical user interface toolkit

AppKit is a graphical user interface toolkit. It initially served as the UI framework for NeXTSTEP. Along with Foundation and Display PostScript, it became one of the core parts of the OpenStep specification of APIs. Later, AppKit and Foundation became part of Cocoa, the Objective-C API framework of macOS. GNUstep, GNU's implementation of the OpenStep/Cocoa API, also contains an implementation of the AppKit API.

Core Foundation is a C application programming interface (API) written by Apple for its operating systems, and is a mix of low-level routines and wrapper functions. Most Core Foundation routines follow a certain naming convention that deal with opaque objects, for example CFDictionaryRef for functions whose names begin with CFDictionary, and these objects are often reference counted (manually) through CFRetain and CFRelease. Internally, Core Foundation forms the base of the types in the Objective-C standard library and the Carbon API.

In the macOS, iOS, NeXTSTEP, and GNUstep programming frameworks, property list files are files that store serialized objects. Property list files use the filename extension .plist, and thus are often referred to as p-list files.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Architecture of macOS</span> Layers of the operating system

The architecture of macOS describes the layers of the operating system that is the culmination of Apple Inc.'s decade-long research and development process to replace the classic Mac OS.

The term target–action design paradigm refers to a kind of software architecture, where a computer program is divided into objects which dynamically establish relationships by telling each other which object they should target and what action or message to send to that target when an event occurs. This is especially useful when implementing graphical user interfaces, which are by nature event-driven.

Objective-C is a high-level general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its NeXTSTEP operating system. Due to Apple macOS’s direct lineage from NeXTSTEP, Objective-C was the standard programming language used, supported, and promoted by Apple for developing macOS and iOS applications until the introduction of the Swift programming language in 2014.

The Cocoa text system is the linked network of classes, protocols, interfaces and objects that provide typography and text field editing capabilities and to Cocoa applications on Apple's macOS, where it is the primary text-handling system. Although "extremely complex", the standard text-handling abilities of the Cocoa text system have been widely praised as without peer. It is possible to implement a fully featured rich text editor in only a few lines of code.

References

  1. ↑ Ported from NeXTSTEP. Recent builds, when built with libobjc2, can use a newer version ported from Mac OS X Snow Leopard
  2. ↑ "GNUstep Developer Tools - RIGS". www.gnustep.org. Retrieved 10 April 2018.
  3. ↑ GScheme Archived 2005-12-18 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ↑ "GNUstep History". gnustep.made-it.com. Retrieved 10 April 2018.
  5. ↑ "gnustep/libs-boron: Boron is the atom that comes before carbon". GitHub. GNUstep. 23 March 2019.
  6. ↑ "gnustep/libs-corebase". GNUstep. 19 November 2019.
  7. ↑ "gnustep/libs-quartzcore". GNUstep. 11 December 2019.
  8. ↑ "Category:Applications - GNUstepWiki". wiki.gnustep.org. Archived from the original on 23 March 2021. Retrieved 10 April 2018.
  9. ↑ "GNUstep Objective-C Runtime 2.0". GitHub. Note: Microsoft's WinObjC project contains a friendly fork of this library that includes a work around for the incremental linking issue.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.