GNUstep screenshot, showing Window Maker and a variety of applications developed with the GNUstep libraries, including a gomoku game, calculator, and TextEdit.[1]
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]
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:
cairo – default backend using the Cairo 2D graphics library.
winlib – default backend on Microsoft Windows systems. Cairo and Windows API variants.
art – old (deprecated) backend on unix-like systems. Uses the vector-based PostScript-like 2D graphics library Libart.
GNUstep inherits some design principles proposed in OPENSTEP (GNUstep predates Cocoa, but Cocoa is based on OPENSTEP) as well as the Objective-C language.
In addition to the Objective-C interface, some small projects under the GNUstep umbrella implement other APIs from Apple:
The Boron library aims to implement the Carbon API. It is very incomplete.[5]
The CoreBase library is designed to be compatible with Core Foundation. It is not complete enough for the Base (Foundation Kit) component to simply be a wrapper around it.[6]
GNUstepWeb, an application server compatible with WebObjects 4.x
Gorm, a user interface builder application, and 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.
^"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.
