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GNUstep Desktop – a refreshed look at NeXT/OpenStep

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There’s a cool project called “GNUstep Desktop” that brings together many old GNUstep technologies, and a few new ones, to provide an entire integrated desktop. We gave it a whirl and are pretty impressed!

GNUstep Desktop on Debian 11

It’s pretty amazing that software that began life 30 years ago is still operational and evolving, but that is the case in the GNUstep project.

At McLaren labs, we have been a fan of modern ObjC on clang, and the ObjC runtime with Foundation libraries and have been slowly learning more about GNUstep GUI and desktop. To be honest, it has been a slow learning process. While there is actually very good information about the various pieces of the GNUstep project, it sometimes seems that there are too many conflicting versions around — there isn’t a single source of truth that brings everything together. But that being said, the quality of many of the components really amazes me.

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Announcing McLaren Synth Kit

The “McLaren Synth Kit” is an Objective-C framework for using MIDI and Audio on Linux computers with the GNUstep programming environment. It is distributed as a project including libraries, headers and example programs at https://github.com/mclarenlabs/libs-mclaren-alpha. You can use it to experiment with sound synthesis for your own personal projects. The project is designed to provide ready-to-compile examples after you clone the repo.

Working with sound is a delicate endeavor. The Synth Kit does a lot of the low-level work of opening devices, managing an audio thread and copying MIDI events to and from dispatch queues. This leaves the audio programmer free to think about designing sounds as a graph of processing units, called Voices.

Standard Voices in the Synth Kit provide envelopes and oscillators of various types, filters and a reverb algorithm. Using the features of modern Objective-C (blocks, ARC and dispatch queues) the Synth Kit makes programming sounds easy, or at least “easier.”

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