[Biococoa-dev] Greetings

Koen van der Drift kvddrift at earthlink.net
Fri Sep 22 22:07:12 EDT 2006


On Sep 21, 2006, at 5:49 PM, Scott Christley wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I first became aware of BioCocoa at the 2005 WWDC, at the time I  
> was just starting to get involved in biology simulations and  
> bioinformatics with my PhD; now that I'm deep in it, I would like  
> to contribute code I've developed.  I wasn't able to make it to the  
> recent WWDC, but congratulations to the EnzymeX guys!

Hi Scott,

Welcome to BioCocoa - it's good to see new names on the mailing list!

> One thing I am interested in is GNUstep support.  From looking at  
> the archives, I may be opening a can of worms but onward I go.  Why  
> I am interested in GNUstep is because I use both platforms.   
> Specifically my Mac tends to be my development platform and for  
> visualization, but when I kick off a bunch of simulations or do  
> some heavy computation, I pass it over to the computer cluster  
> which tends to be 64bit Opteron processors running Linux, so I use  
> GNUstep there.
>
> My understanding from reading the mailing list archives is that  
> optimizations to use CoreFoundation is what killed GNUstep  
> compatibility.  Are people still interested in this, if I were to  
> tackle this issue, supporting both platforms in a clean way and  
> maintaining the compatibility?  From looking at the code, I think  
> many of the differences can be handled with careful macros, keeping  
> CoreFoundation speed on Mac but OpenStep code for GNUstep.

IIRC, we decided to no longer support GNUStep as of version 2.0, but  
I don't recall the reason for this. I am not familiar with GNUStep,  
but from what you are writing, we need to start using macros for  
various functions?


> As for BioCocoa itself, with some of the work I've been doing I've  
> been writing various parsers as well as playing around with some  
> ideas, and I've thought well if I do all this work it would be nice  
> to make it available.  I could just start my own project, but maybe  
> it would be good to add this into BioCocoa.


I think it would be a great idea to have more functionality in the  
framework.


cheers,

- Koen.



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