[MonoDevelop] Native OS X port

[Michael Hutchinson]

On 4/8/07, C.J. Adams-Collier <cjcollier at colliertech.org> wrote:
> Hey there Alex,
>
> Please feel free to post your patches here and we'll help you review
> them.  MD is currently pretty tightly coupled to gtk#, so having a
> cocoa# front end will make for some interesting re-factors.  I'd love to
> help you with it, though, so please let us see the code that you've
> developed so far.
>
> IMHO, we should de-couple the front end from the rest of the features
> and make a native Forms front end as well as Cocoa#.  However, lluis and
> the novell guys are already quite busy with their own work.

Actually, Lluis has already done a lot of work to split out the GUI
stuff into separate assemblies and namespaces where possible, so that
MD can be used as a command-line tool without depending on GTK#. The
problem is that a *lot* of the IDE is necessarily GUI-dependent, and
there are limits to how much you can split out.

See http://www.monodevelop.com/Architecture_Overview for info about
the architecture: MonoDevelop.Core and MonoDevelop.Projects should be
able to be used unmodified. Apart from that, huge chunks will need to
be rewitten to make it natively Cocoa#. IMO it's important to avoid
forking as far as possible, so any patches to improve the separaration
cleanly would be much-appreciated.

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com