Open-Source Cocoa (almost) for Windows

Once upon a time I worked on a clean-room Cocoa clone for Windows with Christopher Lloyd. (Not the actor.)

It’s now open-source. Here’s a screenshot.

Check it out. You can build native Windows applications from the comfort of Xcode.

We also need a lot of help. So, you know, Digg it.

[UPDATE: I appreciate all the interest this has generated in the past couple of days, but this blog is not actually the best vehicle for asking questions vis-a-vis the project’s roadmap, or technical questions about what Cocotron can and cannot do. The best place to go for this kind of stuff is the Google Group for the project — so that anyone who’s signed up can participate in discussions. One of my greatest hopes is that a thriving community forms around the project… ]

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Published:: 12.22.06 / 3am

Category:: Programming

18 Comments

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l0ne 12.22.06 / 10am

What can I say if not… :O
Is there a screenshot somewhere of the Win32 sample app working? It’d be great :O
cjwl 12.22.06 / 12pm

Here is a screenshot of the TextEditor example running on OS X and Windows 2000 in Parallels from the same .app bundle:

http://www.objc.net/blog-media/2006-12-22/TextEditorDualPlatform.png
l0ne 12.22.06 / 1pm

Tried out on my Vista box.
Good: It’s f… COCOA on WINDOWS without all the GNUStep overhead. COOOOOOOL!
Bad: Everything’s owner drawn. It looks ugly on Vista >_
Michael Tsai - Blog - Cocotron 12.22.06 / 1pm

[…] Cocotron is an open-source clean-room Cocoa clone for Windows (via David Young). […]
RabidSnai 12.22.06 / 7pm

very nice! How tightly coupled to WinForms is this? How difficult would it be to get this working on gtk?
Air. Water. UNIX. » Cocotron: CF and AppKit for Windows 12.22.06 / 7pm

[…] John Gruber writes: David Young and Christopher Lloyd have released Cocotron, a BSD-licensed clean room clone of Cocoa (more specifically, Foundation and AppKit) for Windows. The point being that you can use Cocotron to develop, from within Xcode, .app bundles that work on both Mac OS X and Windows. […]
adolfojp 12.22.06 / 7pm

Now, if I could just find a way to develop OS X apps in Windows I’d be happy.
huh? 12.22.06 / 7pm

Sorry, why the FUCK would you want to run OS-SUX apps?
mighty-joe 12.23.06 / 2am

huh?: why the F*** did you start talking?
Anyway, David, Christopher, you did a great job! Keep up the good work!
jack ash 12.23.06 / 9am

what exactly does this provide? I don’t understand
Otto 12.23.06 / 12pm

Did you include CF-LITE in you’re cross compile set?
The combination of this, with CF-LITE and some of the porting going on with webcore/javascript core have many possiblities
David Young 12.23.06 / 2pm

CF-Lite would be interesting to integrate, as would the ongoing effort to get WebKit going on Windows. A key feature of Cocotron, though, is its permissive license, and I’m not familiar with the APSL enough to say whether or not integrating the projects would compromise the freedoms granted by the MIT License.

From my perspective (and I imagine that a lot of third-party developers would agree), it’s very important that I be able to use open-source technologies in a way such that I can continue to earn a living.
Eduo 12.23.06 / 7pm

Very cool indeed. I’ve been clamoring for something like this for some time now.

Is there a roadmap of sorts? A compatibility list? Things to avoid?
David Young 12.24.06 / 3am

RabidSnai: The coupling between Cocotron and Win32 is deliberately very loose, it’s designed to be able to accept multiple graphics backends. Win32 is certainly the best-implemented and best-tested, at the moment.

Eduo: the roadmap largely is up for discussion. Best place to get involved is the Google Group for project developers.
l0ne 12.24.06 / 3am

David: the APSL is basically a BSD license, with clauses to prevent you from rebuilding the whole of Mac OS X starting from Darwin (ie you cannot add the proprietary kexts from an OS X installation to Darwin to turn into a simil-OS X, which is a violation of Freedom Zero, but should not prevent compatibility with the MIT license).
Günther 12.24.06 / 10am

Cocotron looks interesting. Coming from a GNUstep background, I’m a bit concerned about the duplicate effort that’s done by the two projects. (There’s also a discussion on the GNUstep mailing lists about that which you may be interested in.) I read on your information pages that the goals are different from GNUstep. What exactly is the difference?
l0ne 12.24.06 / 5pm

Günther: Cocotron allows for seamless development of *Step apps from inside Xcode; also, the AppKit and Foundation frameworks are self-contained (Foundation contains the Objective-C runtime) and embeddable, not requiring a whole system directory hierarchy to function correctly.
Justin 7.3.07 / 3pm

I absolutely love how people get so amazingly upset when people do things they don’t like. Sounds like the guy ‘Huh’ from above was going to have an aneurysm or something.

I think the whole thing is grrrrreat!

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Most of the time I work on Slide, but sometimes I write software for Mac OS X, then give it away:

Check out the Cocotron — someday it may be Cocoa for Windows.

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