I’ve now spent an untold amount of time working on getting Objective-C Max Objects working on Windows. Anytime I get something working, it seems that it will be broken in about 5 minutes. The problem is that GNUstep is totally ridiculous.

GNUstep fancies itself as making everyone’s life easier for developing with Objective-C. Quite the opposite is true. Instead of making things work with normal make files, they have their own system of make files that goes through many mazes of indirection, and makes it impossible to work with any of the myriad of tools available for makefiles.

And then they delude you into thinking that they are compatible with the basic workings of Apple’s objc implementation. But it isn’t really true. In some cases they think they are smart and have come up with some faster ways of doing things, and so made their own functions instead of doing something compatible. This is not helpful!

GNU is supposed to stand for “GNU’s not Unix”. Given my various experiences with some of this software, and especially with GNUstep, I have a new one: “GNU’s not usable”.