[Mono-list] Windows.Forms on OSX

[Greg Brown]

Hi,

I'm a new subscriber to the list. I was excited to read recently that Ximian
is planning to bring Mono to Mac OSX. 

I noticed on the Mono project site that the plan is to implement
Windows.Forms on OSX using the Cocoa framework. I don't know how far along
the port is, but I'm curious to know if anyone has looked into the
feasibility of using Carbon as opposed to Cocoa. From what I understand, the
team currently porting the SWT (a Java GUI API that is part of the Eclipse
project, http://eclipse.org) to OSX chose Carbon over Cocoa because Carbon
is a lower-level API. Among other things, I know they had a lot of trouble
mapping SWT's event model to Cocoa. Although I have not yet used it, I
imagine that the Windows.Forms event model is similar, since I understand
that it provides low-level access to the system event loop. There were also
some other issues. A port of Windows.Forms to OSX using Cocoa could face
similar challenges.

Additionally, Cocoa applications are written either in Objective-C or in
Java. I don't believe Cocoa is accessible from C. This may or may not be an
issue for Mono - not having seen any of the source code yet, I don't know
how it is being implemented under the hood.

So, it seems like it might be worth considering using Carbon. Thoughts?

Greg