[ruby-talk:16444] Re: Ruby - Objective C - GNUstep

Avi Bryant wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 12 Jun 2001, Laurent Julliard wrote:
> 
> > GNUstep is all developed in Objective C which is fine with me but beside
> > that they have adopted Guile as their "scripting" language which I
> > personnally don;t like that much. Since Objective C borrowed most of its
> > OO concepts from Smalltalk I think having Ruby as an alternate high
> > level scripting language for GNUstep would be just great. Plus when you
> > read the specs of the 2 languages you realize that they fit nicely
> > together.
> >
> > So I have 2 questions:
> >
> > - Has anybody worked on that before (For those who are also on the
> > japanese mailing list, are you aware of anything on this side? )
> 
> I started a quick proof of concept of this, but it needs some work before
> it's usable.  What'll take the most time is data conversion issues (eg,
> I'd like to write subclasses of NSMutableString, NSMutableArray, and
> NSMutableDictionary backed by Ruby String, Array, and Hash objects... if
> MetaRuby were done we could also write equivalents going the other way).

That's interesting.

If I understand what you said you'd like to "rewrite" NSMutableString,
NSMutableArray, and NSMutableDictionary in Ruby right? Why is it better
to do that rather than simply map the GNUStep objects in Ruby? 

I must confess that I'm pretty new to Ruby. When you say data conversion
I guess you mean converting the C structures returned by the Objective C
libraries into Ruby object right ?

Please elaborate. I'm really interested in pursuing this project.

PS: Do you have some code that we could share now?