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GNUstep Getting Started

| Objective-C |

Objective-C popularity aggressively increased based on TIOBE Index (for October 2009)

TIOBE-objc-2009

The reason is simple - iPhone and all related stuff. We should be ready to develop Objective-C based application in future. The worst thing I don’t have a Mac, so I don’t have development environment. I need to get basic Objective-C knowledge, and here several solutions:

  • buy Mac
  • install Hackintosh on PC
  • try GNU compiler and play with Objective-C

The better choice is the last one (for me). As I’m a Windows XP user and I don’t have a time to set up Linux, I’m going to use some Windows GNU GCC port: Cygwin or MinGW.

There are two cross-platform projects which implements Objective-C Cocoa/OpenStep APIs:

  • The Cocotron - this project uses Mac machine for build (I didn’t dig into this), but built application can be run on Windows.
  • GNUstep - this project supports many platforms (Windows included).

My choice is GNUstep.

Here is the useful links for quick start:

How to build your first GNUstep application in Windows?

In general it’s simple, but if you have some troubles with it here is the links:

  1. Installing and using GNUstep and Objective-C on Windows
  2. Writing GNUstep Makefiles (I highly recommend it)
  3. Compile Objective-C Programs Using gcc