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Mono's Cocoa# Underway, GTK# Takes on Windows.Forms
Gentu writes "OSNews posted some exclusive screenshots of a new project in the Mono community: Cocoa#. Apparently there are a couple of Apple engineers helping out the project that allows developers to create graphical Cocoa applications under Mac OS X using the C#, Python or Basic language. Mono seems to be doing well in the Windows land too, allowing developers to use GTK# instead of Windows.Forms to create multi-platform apps."
There are some decent arguments for using Mono over Java on Linux. Those arguments don't hold up as well on OSX, though. Java support on the Mac is in many ways superior to Java on any other platform, especially for Swing apps (the counterpart to most Cocoa# apps.) Still it could be attractice to have a framework that made it as easy as Java is for developing cross-platform (Windows/Linux/OSX) apps that would have significant performance advantages over Java on 2 out of 3 of those platforms.
..from embracing (and extending!) C# and .NET. Programmers generally like C# and .NET for application development, and Objective-C has some serious flaws.
Best Buy can have you arrested
while you are at it, feel free to improve Windows.Forms. Microsoft's version of it has some odd limitations, and considering they are planning to replace Windows.Forms with a complete re-write, they are not spending any time fixing these things.
For example, it is supposedly impossible to have a context menu on a treeview that responds properly to both the mouse right-click and the context menu keyboard key (without resorting to Win32). If anyone has got this to work, please tell how..
A new from scratch implementation has started with four of the top Mono developers that are now
locked up in Provo Utah working around the clock
to delivery the new implementation of Windows.Forms
What are they doing then? I thought using wine was going to solve the p/invoke issue. Are you just going to ignore the p/invoke and just implement the exposed API?
Even back in the 0.8 days, I had very few problems making a medium sized app (~4000 lines), developed entirely under linux with Mono. Everything worked on the first try when I ran it on windows with .NET.
Now that's true cross platform ability. Even with Java I've never had it work that flawlessly. Thanks Miguel and Mike Kerster and the rest of the Mono team. You guys rock.
I think the world has finally left me behind. I just don't get this obsession with .NET. Even the Java ecstacies back in the mid 90's weren't this enthusiastic. There are fifty stories on related topics on OSNews, and .NET evangelists are work are sprouting up everywhere like dandelions. Hell, Miguel can't take a dump these days without Slashdot reporting it.
Why the obsession with Microsoft technology? What's it going to give me, an embedded systems developer? Why are vice presidents at work mandating its use in a hard realtime product? Frankly it appears to me that the world has gone stark raving mad.
Has there EVER been any language or framework that generated so much unbridled enthusiasm before? Did they lace the spec with speed or something? I'm not doubting that these various Microsoft cloning projects have some merit, but some of you guys are going way over the top.
I guess I'm just an old fashioned fuddy duddy who should stick with old fashioned languages, frameworks and music.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I've been looking high and low for a cross platform GUI tool, and the only one I particularily like is Qt. Which, of course, you have to pay lots of money for to get the Windows version (or deal with the "freeware" bit stuck in the title bars of windows). I'm gonna look into Wx.NET; just found out about that in this discussion.
Anyway, I'm reading over the FAQ for GTK#, and it says you need to have cygwin. So, my question is, does only the developer of the software need to have cygwin, and then it builds it using libraries provided with it and outputs a nice standalone application, or does everyone who wants to use it need to install cygwin? I can't seem to figure this out from the site...
There is another choice for native GUIs using C# on Windows, Linux, and OS X: wx.NET, bindings of the wxWindows library to Mono and Microsoft's .NET implementation.
wxWindows is great because it gives you a uniform API across different platforms and toolkits, while at the same time using native widgets and giving you access to platform-specific features if you like.
Is this based on anything? It's slower than raw C or assembly of course, but quite fast overall.
Everything below this sentence is from http://www.alastairs-place.net/cocoa/faq.txt:
* 2.7 How fast are Objective-C messages?
The name "message" might make you think that they are slow; however, they are
actually quite fast. Here are some figures from a 1GHz PowerPC G4 (courtesy
of Marcel Weiher):Local function call refers to a call to a function in the same executable or
dynamic object module. Cross-module function call is a call from one
executable or dynamic object module into another.
On current Apple versions of GCC, an Objective-C message results in a call to
objc_msgSend(), which is itself a cross-module function call. That means that
the actual method dispatch only takes 17ns (on average), which is pretty
quick.
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
i'm developing a C# application which has a System.Windows.Forms (SWF) frontend for the Windows version, and a GTK# frontend for the Linux version. I was hoping to get rid of the SWF frontend and deploy my application on Windows and Linux using the GTK# frontend. Despite all of the hype surrounding Mono/GTK# (thanks miguel) i have not been able to get this working because GTK# simply doesn't work correctly with MS.NET. There are parts of GTK# that actually rely on an incompatibilty between Mono and MS.NET to work correctly. So when this code is executed with MS.NET, you'll get runtime exceptions. The same code will function correctly on Windows when you use Mono on Windows, but then i get memory leaks everytime i use Regex.Match which my application needs quite often. So after leaking about 395MB of RAM, the garbage collector will crash with an error ("too many heap sections"). The same code runs perfectly on Linux in Mono.
I would really like to see Mono and GTK# completely ready to be used on Windows for _serious_ stuff (as in: not the average Hello World GTK# app) but rigth now, it just isn't up to the task yet. On Linux, it's pretty good alraedy, but on Windows it's just unusable for my application. I've had to go back to using my old SWF frontend for my windows users.
Why GTK#? Honestly, GTK is probably one of the worst toolkit for real cross platform development.
The Windows port of GTK sucks. This WiMP thing (Or whatever it's called - it makes GTK app to some degree look like native Windows apps) is not that great. The performance of the GTK(WIMP) apps' GUI is noticeable lower than a native GUI.
Under Mac OS X it's even worse. GTK only works under X11. This means no Aqua look & feel. No copy and paste or drag'n'drop between native OSX apps and GTK apps. Even keyboard shortcuts are different.
Why didn't you chose something like wxWidgets? At least wxWidgets offers native GUIs under any platforms it runs. wxWidgets or any other toolkit that offers real platform independence.
Or: With all these XML GUIs under
Also - from what I've read on the mailing list archives - Mono only works sometimes on BSD systems.
What kind of independence is this? You are only focused on x86-Linux running GNOME.
Ximian does not seem really interested in real platform CocoaSharp. Stuff like Qt# (for KDE users), CocoaSharp, and other cross platform develpment is not done by any Ximian guy, but from contributors.
What most of us want is something better than what Microsoft does, more than that, we want something exciting, radical, and different. The mindset that Miguel and others seem to share is that as long as "our" stuff is Free, it is better, and there's no point in creating a better technology, we might just as well copy Microsoft, fix a few bugs, extend here and there, and, voila, you have something better. The technology isn't better, but the implementation is, and that's enough, right?
It's more than that though, it's an unwinnable contest. As long as Microsoft's "competitors" are merely trying to catch up with Microsoft, implementing the same technologies, there's no way, in practice, those competitors can actually be better except on purely political grounds.
Now don't get me wrong, I consider myself an enthusiast of free software. But if you're going to write an operating system from the ground up, then you're wasting a lot of opportunities by relentlessly copying someone else, especially copying the technologies - from the user interfaces to the APIs - of a company whose reputation in the industry is of being first, not best. It's a waste of talent.
The issue becomes worse when you consider that these competitors are trying to build Microsoft's environment upon an operating system that has a fundementally different philosophy at its heart, meaning any competitor designed this way is going to be fundamentally flawed. Linux, arguably, should be abandoned in favour of ReactOS if this development path continues.
A substantial section of the free software and open source communities lacks the talent and imagination to build something new, and unfortunately that section is leading development at the moment. Miguel is merely the figurehead for that movement. I don't blame people for feeling that way, I know a lot of people would like a Free clone of Microsoft's operating systems and environments, I just feel that this is a bandwagon the GNU/Linux distributions are unwise in hopping on to and pouring so much development time into.
The question really is do you want a Free Windows, or do you want a choice of platforms? Right now, GNU/Linux is Window's most powerful competitor, yet all the excitement, the innovation, the "We want to create something better" attitude, is coming from elsewhere.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.