In which GNUstep confuses and ultimately disappoints

I’m not the most hardcore of GNUstep people, but I’m certainly somewhat invested. I’ve been building apps, lurking in lists, and contributing code on and off for around 13 years, including a job working with a few of the maintainers. I am trying to build the corpus of documentation intrinsic to GNUstep, i.e. that which doesn’t require interpretating Apple’s Cocoa docs through a compatibility lens.

So when I discovered that an app I need doesn’t exist and that I’d have to make it myself, GNUstep was the obvious choice. I could take all that experience and investment in Objective-C and Cocoa and build the app I need. I’d probably be able to contribute to the framework along the way, too: a previous side project of mine resulted in adding NSUUID to gnustep-base.

This time, however, the amount of framework support needed proved too great. The thing I want is an app to help me organise and read some PDFs, and there’s no PDF-reading support in GNUstep. Well, let me be more specific: there has been, but it’s disappeared. There was a library called PopplerKit that wraps the poppler PDF-rendering library. However the only references to that are to a subversion repo in the now-defunct Gna! project: i.e. there is no PopplerKit available any more.

One option I considered is to write my own poppler wrapper, perhaps exposing the same interface as Apple’s PDFKit. This would probably be welcome in the GNUstep community, would improve their libraries’ API compatibility with Cocoa, and be useful to other developers. However, it’s also a distraction from what I’m trying to do, which is to make my PDF app.

So I decided to choose a different technology, where PDF rendering is already available. Poppler has a Qt5 interface already, so I built my app using C++ and Qt5. After half an hour of effort I already have a page-turning PDF viewer, which is not pleasant but enough to let me be confident that I can build the rest of the application.

I had thought that this would be the end of the story. I would have a moral here (still a useful moral) about picking the technology that lets you get your task solved, being realistic about how much you’re drawn to your pet project or favourite “stack” and whether that bias is worth tipping the balance: in many cases, it probably is, but be aware of what it’s costing you. I expected to talk about code rot, and to despair over the fact that a library I knew about and was aware could solve my problem no longer existed.

Then, in preparing this post, I happened to dive through an unrelated repository on github, the GNUstep Applications Project (a repository containing a collection of unrelated applications), and discovered that it contains a PDFKit implementation. It doesn’t contain PDFView so can’t be used as a reader, so it doesn’t change the choice over which of GNUstep or Qt should be used now. But it does change the amount of effort required to reimplement PDFKit on top of GNUstep, should I revisit that in the future.

So there’s a point in here about discoverability too. I did quite a lot of searching to find that there isn’t a PopplerKit, and also found that there wasn’t a GNUstep PDFKit. Even so, there was, and even more searching turned it up. En route I found that a different technology had what I wanted, and changed my choice of programming language and application framework in order to use that technology in my project. You can’t merely build it and expect them to come, you have to show them that it’s there too.