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Re: Mac OS X presents an opportunity for Dylan
On Thursday, November 30, 2000, at 02:56 PM, Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
> Apple has made it clear that Project Builder is the way
> to go in the future with MacOS X. They have put MPW in maintainence mode,
> and CodeWarrior 6 *only* does Carbon and Classic, but not Cocoa/YB, and it's
> not at all clear when or if CW will do Cocoa. Moreover, CW is a commercial
> product, even with it's non-commercial license, which immediately shuts out
> many less affluent, younger developers, who are precisely the sort who are
> open minded and experimental enough to consider Dylan seriously - not that
> us geezers wouldn't like Dylan too, but habits have a way of becoming set
> with the passing of time...
I sympathize. I currently can't afford the Carbonized set of bug-fixes that is the CodeWarrior 6 upgrade, particularly at its marked-up UK price.
That said, the new Finder in MacOS X is made with CodeWarrior, and for Carbonization of current projects it's ideal. The CodeWarrior plug-in shows developers that Dylan interfaces with the stuff they use usually on Mac. People know and like CodeWarrior, and it gives us access to the Class browser and other cool stuff. Several people requested Dylan under MPW on MacOS Classic because of MPW's free status, but due to the differences in runtime library support I couldn't deliver it.
> Moreover, I've used the latest CW plugin under CW 6/MacOS X Public Beta, and
> frankly, it's painful to use, at least in part because CW 6 itself is broken
> under MacOS X
I certainly didn't find Gabor's plugin painful to use, but if you're having trouble bear in mind that it is still in beta. He listens closely to feedback, and if you can provide reproducable cases of problems or issues I'm sure he'll take a look. CW 6's MacOS X deficiencies are outside anyone's control. :-)
> Whatever the other faults of MacOS X Public Beta, the
> functioning of Project Builder is *not* one of them - it is a pleasure to
> use.
Well, I use CodeWarrior daily, and I struggle a little with Project Builder. It's unfamiliarity, I know, but I'm sure many existing Mac programmers will have the same experience.
> Apple have made Project Builder a free download.
We don't know if this will be Project Builder's final status.
> Making Gwydion Dylan run
> under Project Builder would give Dylan immediate, widespread, free
> availability to the very first round of developers creating Carbon and Cocoa
> apps under and for MacOS X.
With the next release of Gwydion Dylan, MacOS X can run the standard command-line Gwydion Dylan tools. The BSD/GNU tools are likely to remain free (the Darwin tools install on MacOS X OK and almost work at present), so between the straight command-line version of d2c (which is free and uses free tools) and the CodeWarrior IDE plug-in (which is free at present but uses value-added commercial tools) we have something for most people. You *can* run Gwydion Dylan for free under MacOS X.
> Please focus your resources/time on making
> Gwydion compile projects under Project Builder (including necessary
> interfaces to Interface Builder for Cocoa projects if that can be done).
In theory we can use the C versions of the Objective-C interfaces to link to Objective-C code. I did some research into this and it's probably the best way to go for Obj-C/Dylan integration.
As for IB support, I don't know exactly what you're after. Dragging & dropping of Dylan classes? The new Carbon Interfaces can handle .nibs, so we can use IB stuff from Dylan under Carbon. Drag & drop would take a lot longer, and would clash with Gwydion Maintainer's core mission objectives.
> If Gwydion can seamlessly build Carbon *and* Cocoa apps under Project Builder,
> I think Dylan can grab some *serious* mind share from C/C++ *and* Java on
> MacOS X.
Well, C# is going to wipe out Java on PC, so you never know.
> Thanks for listening.
We're listening. MacOS X can be used to develop and run full GUI Carbon applications for free using Gwydion Dylan. If anyone else has a view on Mac support the "Mac Team" of Gwydion Maintainers would like to hear it.
- Rob.
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