The GNU `Objective C Class Library' Home Page

What is the GNU Objective C Class Library?

The GNU Objective C Class Library (libobjects) is a library of general-purpose, non-graphical Objective C objects. The libobjects library is to GNU's Objective C what libg++ is to GNU's C++; it is the GNU project's official gathering place for Objective C objects.

In the near future, the library will be changing its name to the ``GNUstep Base Library''.

The GNU Objective C Class Library will implement the non-graphical of GNUstep. The GNUstep project is the Free Software Foundation's effort to implement a free-software version of NeXT's OpenStep standard. Libobjects is still in the development stages, but it already contains well over 60 classes of the GNUstep FoundationKit, and over 60,000 lines of code including both GNU and FoundationKit classes. The GUI portion of the GNUstep project should have a first alpha release in Spring of 1996. You can read more this, and the rest of the project in the GNUstep FAQ.

The library is known to compile and run on many platforms.

The library's lead developer is Andrew McCallum <mccallum@gnu.ai.mit.edu>. Other developers include: Scott Christley, Adam Fedor, Peter Burka, Georg Turparev, Albin Jones, Mark Lakata, Jeremy Bettis, and Kresten Krab Thorup. For the legal record, a list of who wrote what can be found here.

There is an introduction to the Objective C language at this page, provided by NeXT.

The list of people who have volunteered to implement various portions of the GNUstep FoundationKit can be found here. If you would like to volunteer, you can begin by looking at this list.

The GNU classes in the library feature:

You can find extremely preliminary, old, unfinished texinfo documentation here.

Where can you get it?

The most recently released ``official'' version can be FTP'ed from prep.ai.mit.edu.
The most recently released alpha version can be FTP'ed from alpha.gnu.ai.mit.edu.

The most recent developer's snapshot can be FTP'ed from ftp.cs.rochester.edu.
There is an important README for the snapshot releases.


Other useful links:
GNU coding standards
OpenStep Spec in HTML


Corrections or comments on this page? mccallum@gnu.ai.mit.edu