[Mono-list] Windows.Forms on OSX

[Jonathan LaCour]

I completely disagree with Greg here.  Cocoa is really the wave of the
future for development in Mac OS X and it would be short-sighted to port to
Carbon over Cocoa unless its absolutely necessary.

First of all, I have noticed that Cocoa applications behave and look
consistently and noticeably better than Carbon applications.  I have noticed
this throughout MS Office v.X, and in many places it makes the applications
look unprofessional.  I would hate for this to transition over to Mono's
Windows.Forms implementation.

In addition, Carbon was originally intended as a bridge between OS 9 and OS
X.  It has since evolved into a more robust framework that entirely new
applications can be written for, but Cocoa is still the framework of choice
for Apple.  Carbon is generally used to port applications from OS 9 to OS X,
because it minimizes the porting necessary, while still allowing the
application to run natively on OS X.  This is true for many applications
currently, including MS Office v.X, Adobe Photoshop, and many other
mainstream applications.

Mono on the other hand is a new project that has never existed on OS 9.
Thus, if effort is going to be put into the Windows.Forms portion of .NET, I
would much prefer and encourage it to be done on the Cocoa framework.  It
simply makes more sense.  I am not sure if it would take more time using
Cocoa, but doing it right is more important than doing it quickly --
especially in free software.

As far as the claim that Cocoa can only be accessed from Objective-C and
Java, that is at least partially true.  But remember that Objective-C is
simply a superset of ANSI C.  This means that you could easily write a
standard C program and compile it with an Objective-C compiler.  With this
in mind, I do not think that this would be too large of a barrier to the
Windows.Forms implementation.

Just my two cents =)

 - Jonathan

> From: Greg Brown <gbrown@molecular.com>
> Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2002 11:28:02 -0400
> To: "Mono List (E-mail)" <mono-list@ximian.com>
> Subject: [Mono-list] Windows.Forms on OSX
> 
> 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
> 
> 
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