GNUstep under Ubuntu Linux

Usually it is a good a idea to just use the package manager of your distribution to get a stable and well integrated GNUstep environment:

sudo apt-get install gnustep gnustep-devel

If you want to develop new apps and try the newest features consider the approach described below.

Compiling Everything from Scratch

The following repo contains scripts that compile and install everything needed for GNUstep Objective-C 2.0. The script uses clang and libobjc2 for all the awesome new features like ARC, blocks/Grand Central Dispatch, etc.

For example, to build GNUstep under Ubuntu 19.04, do:

git clone https://github.com/plaurent/gnustep-build
cd gnustep-build/ubuntu-19.04-clang-8.0-runtime-2.0/
./GNUstep-buildon-ubuntu1904.sh

The demo.sh and demo-gui.sh scripts show example code and compilation examples (using command line as well as the recommended GNUmakefile approach.)

Reference manuals for GNUStep, including available APIs, etc, are available at http://www.gnustep.org/developers/documentation.html

General Note: When compiling your own code, it is generally good to tell clang both the family and version of the runtime: -fobjc-runtime=gnustep-2.0 (The current version number can be had by looking at the latest ANNOUNCE filename in https://github.com/gnustep/libobjc2 (e.g., ANNOUNCE.1.8.1))