List of current open-source projects implementing OpenStep and Mach

[Rhetorica]

ravynOS hit the front page of Hacker News today, so I thought I'd do a round-up listing the (current) major efforts to build some sort of implementation of OpenStep.

• Obviously the oldest is GNUstep, which is so old that the first versions actually ran under OPENSTEP 4.2! Although Étoilé used to be the star of the GNUstep scene, it's been dead for over a decade, and the current major distros of WindowMaker all return to the classic NeXT look. From strictest to most inclusive, they are NEXTSPACE, GSDE, and Window Maker Live.
• Although somewhat infrequently-updating, the legacy of the community Darwin project still exists in the form of PureDarwin. However the last version is Darwin 17, which is from the macOS 10.13 days, and does not include a GUI. Slightly more activity occurs on their Discord server.
• Darling is a project to make a WINE equivalent for macOS—it parses Mach-O binaries and intercepts calls to let basic ObjC programs run under Linux. It aims to be a clean implementation of Cocoa modern OpenStep, though only very primitive graphical applications work currently. Quartz is hard, man!
• The newest kid on the block is the aforementioned ravynOS project, which combines bits of the forgotten NextBSD project (which added Mach messaging to the FreeBSD kernel) with the Cocoa implementation of Darling. Its goal is to be the ReactOS equivalent to Darling's WINE equivalent, and the two indeed share code much like WINE and ReactOS did. ravynOS does have a rudimentary X11-based desktop environment with Mac-like affectations, but it's no more (or less) mature than Darling.
• Finally, helloSystem is none of the above—it's a distro of FreeBSD with a bunch of Qt apps running on top, reproducing the look and feel of late-era Mac OS X. But just like WMlive is more complete than NEXTSPACE, helloSystem offers a comparatively robust and complete user experience versus any of the other "open Mac" projects. ravynOS seems to have begun by tearing up the floorboards of helloSystem.

(Did I miss any?)

[jeffburg]

I had never heard of darling. that's really cool!

[Rhetorica]

I've found another thing for this thread, sort of: Gershwin is a GNUstep distribution aimed at reproducing the OS X experience. The project is not very far along compared to wmlive or GSDE, but it has live discs based on Debian, Arch, and GhostBSD. It's like they're trying to nerdsnipe @jeffburg. I think it needs a branded port of MathEdit.

[wmlive]

Gershwin is a GNUstep distribution aimed at reproducing the OS X experience. The project is not very far along compared to wmlive or GSDE, but it has live discs based on Debian, Arch, and GhostBSD.

Gershwin is indeed a very nice project and a true GNUstep distribution. For people interested in what GNUstep actually is about, despite its current lack of applications, it is a much better choice then wmlive. Especially laudable about it is that they completely do away with the traditional/retro NeXTSTEP looks and assume much more appropriate modern aesthetics.

Unlike Gerswhin, GS-Desktop, or NeXTSPACE, wmlive never was, nor intents to be, a GNUstep distribution, but rather an opinioned Debian Linux variant with Window Maker as its default GUI. While it does include a large range of GNUstep applications, these are by no means the primary focus of the distribution, and are primarily included to give GNUstep more visibility. In fact, wmlive would be perfectly usable without any single GNUstep component.
Furthermore, the Debian based GNUstep packages included in wmlive have a very serious downside, which is that they do not (yet) support libobjc2 and ARC, which currently makes them rather useless for software developers aiming for source compatibility with modern Mac OS. There are plans by the Debian GNUstep maintainers to change that, but it won't become the default until the next offical Debian release in two years...

[Rhetorica]

Found another GNUstep distro today: AGNoStep, which has just had its 2.0 release. This is a French-developed project that sits somewhere near WMlive and GSDE; it retains all the fundamental functional distinctions of an authentic NeXT experience (vertical detached menus, iconified windows building from left to right) but takes a step toward modernity with a different icon theme, color scheme, and extra dock for widgets at the top-centre of the screen. Like WMlive it is based on Debian.



Bizarrely it comes with what appears to be an ncurses-based configuration app?!

Via: linuxfr.org article, r/gnustep post.

Those articles allege that this is GNUstep's 35th anniversary. I am not certain GNUstep is really 35 years old—most of the numbers I can find suggest the project dates to 1998, with 0.5 being the first release. (How can you have an OpenStep project before OpenStep?!) It is, however, the 35th anniversary of GPL v2; maybe that's the actual date they're unintentionally commemorating.

[wmlive]

Those articles allege that this is GNUstep's 35th anniversary. I am not certain GNUstep is really 35 years old—most of the numbers I can find suggest the project dates to 1998, with 0.5 being the first release. (How can you have an OpenStep project before OpenStep?!) It is, however, the 35th anniversary of GPL v2; maybe that's the actual date they're unintentionally commemorating.

If GNUstep project leader Gregory Casamento can be believed, than the 35th anniversary of GNUstep is in fact real: According to gnustep.made-it.com/Guides/History.html, "on the 11th of May 1991, the term "GnUStep" was coined for the very first time."[1]

Personally, reading that very same timeline, i'd rather consider the official start of the GNUstep project at January 1995 with the first announcement in the GNU Bulletin, or March 1995 with the first found CVS checkin of Adam Fedor, or maybe even only 27 April 1995 when gnustep.org was officially registered.

The developers behind AGNoStep and Gershwin regularily contribute to the discuss-gnustep mailing list.
I really like their coopetition approach in shared development.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnustep/2026-05/msg00041.html

[Rhetorica]

Personally, reading that very same timeline, i'd rather consider the official start of the GNUstep project at January 1995 with the first announcement in the GNU Bulletin, or March 1995 with the first found CVS checkin of Adam Fedor, or maybe even only 27 April 1995 when gnustep.org was officially registered.

Yeah, I was shown the same history and basically came to the same opinion, that coining a name in the context of "wouldn't it be nice if we had X" doesn't really count as starting a project! 1995 feels more right, as the point where some 'step' was actually added to a project that was previously best described as Smalltalk-on-ObjC.

[turbolent]

There's also The Cocotron

Cocotron is a developer SDK which implements a usable amount AppKit and Foundation for Windows and Foundation for Linux/BSD in Objective-C. You need to install cross-compilers and cross-compile the frameworks using Xcode on Mac OS X.

The Cocotron is an open source project which aims to implement a cross-platform Objective-C API similar to that described by Apple Inc.'s Cocoa documentation. This includes the AppKit, Foundation, Objective-C runtime and support APIs such as CoreGraphics and CoreFoundation.

The purpose of the project is to provide an easy to use cross-platform solution for Objective-C development. In particular, source code level compatibility with recent versions of Apple's frameworks.

The general goal is to provide complete support on any viable platform, the project is intended to be as portable as possible. However, most of the work at this time is focused on providing support for Microsoft Windows. In particular the NT based versions, 2000 up to 10.

[wmlive]

There's also The Cocotron

Judging by the date of the latest code submit at its repo at github.com/cjwl/cocotron, the project hasn't had any further activity since about 11 years.
Is this project still alive maybe elsewhere?

[turbolent]

Yeah, the Darling team has an active fork of it: https://github.com/darlinghq/darling-cocotron

Also, parts of the Cocotron were used in Microsoft's WinObjC project: https://github.com/microsoft/winobjc