Questions about gnome-objc?

[Dirk Luetjens <dirk luedi oche de>]

Hello,

last week I tried to learn some Objective-C. As an example I started a
small app gpstool which tries to be a frontend to the pstools namely
psnup, psbook, pstops. 

A few questions arised about the Objective-C bindings for gnome and gtk.
Perhaps someone with more knowledge can give me a hint:
(Sorry if the terms I use are C++ like. I just started to learn objc:-)

1.) Why do all objects have a cast"whatever" method and a member
variable which is a pointer to the casted Object? Isn't this kind of
bloat if you have the pointer to the object stored x-times through the
inheritance hierarchy?

2.) I thought that overloading of intherited methods and calling the
overloaded method within the new method is the right way. Wouldn't it
be better to use only init Functions with default Arguments or
overloaded versions of init than using initApp, InitWithAppWinInfo, ... 
Functions? I don't know if Objective-C supports Default Arguments.

3.) What is the performace penalty of such a wrapper library. When I
compare just the size of the libraries, I'm astonished, that libobgtk is
about half the size of libgtk. Isn't that to much just for a wrapper
library?

libgtk.so      608916 Bytes (stripped)
libobgtk.so   1674271 Bytes (not stripped)
libobgtk.so    260060 Bytes (stripped)

4.) Can someone explain me how GNUstep is related to GNOME, or vice versa?
>From what I find on the net, there must be an Next-Developper-App, where
you drag-n-click your application together. Will there ever be a GNOME
version of this?

5.) Where can I learn more about Objective-C?

6.) What is the future of gnome-objc?

I made a few wrappers for the non existent gnome objects "About",
"FileEntry", "PropertyBox" in the way of the other libobgnome bindings.
Perhaps they are usefull for the completeness of the library. 

Dirk