Porting Swift to Haiku
haiku-os.org
haiku-os.org
Both are implementation-specific (and need not even be identical on a single platform. Early C++ compilers on Windows were incompatible with each other, for example)
But giving the way the Swift compiler is itself written in C++ and tied to the LLVM, i bet it will be "easy" for the Swift compiler team to create interoperability between C++ and Swift.
I think their current goal with ABI compability is one step in that direction.. so it will be just a question of Swift understanding C++ mangling in elf/coff/mach-o objects for the link time, and interpret C++ headers using Clang for the compile time.
Given all that, is not hard to predict that Swift will probably have the best interop with C++ code than any other language out there.
Then there's a second part where i comment about the ability to parse C++ header using Clang when parsing Swift code, so you can get this in compile time. (You probably noted this part and lost some of the information that i've implied from the first).
So, i didnt imply that it was because the Swift compiler was written in C++ that it would have these properties, but because of its history of being tied together with LLVM and Clang, being coded by the same people behind LLVM and Clang.
I hope it gets more clear what i've meant to imply with my comment now.
this isn't about writing
swift as a haiku.
You can browse the web, what else?
What other languages are supported, is there Haiku Ruby?
There's a decent office suite, Vim, IRC client, etc
> What other languages are supported, is there Haiku Ruby?
The usual complement of scripting languages (Ruby, Python, Perl, Lua), any JVM language, Go, partially working ports of Haskell and Mercury, Rust (no Cargo port yet), probably some others.
Personally i'd like to see the latest version of ruby work and postgres.
But also docker support would suffice too.
I'm pretty sure Haiku has exactly that already? Pretty sure it did last time I ran it...
Huh? Wouldn't the "bare minimum" be a programming editor?
The Haiku OS
Could use a modern language
Port Swift to HaikuAnd Go, if that counts as a “modern” language.
Someone, obviously, cares. They took the time to port it.
These same sentiments were said about another alternative open source OS 20 years ago. And yet, here we are 20 years later and it powers everything from supercomputers to mobile phones and TVs
Yeah, and I have to figure that with Swift being Apple's darling right now that there's the opportunity to attract more interest from idle developers that otherwise wouldn't have given Haiku a moment's thought.
* i686-unknown-haiku
* x86_64-unknown-haiku
They're basically cross-compile only, Tier 3 supported at the moment.
Package management is in and the infrastructure around it is being worked on.
I've been following the development of Haiku (OpenBeOS) on and off since BeOS got discontinued -- for something like 16 years now.
While the effort and progress of the Haiku team is commendable, 16 years is a long time to produce an OS, so one might argue that they never had a good grasp of their priorities in the first place.
In the 16 years since OpenBeOS was announced, the world has changed drastically.
I remember running BeOS on a Pentium II, and it was amazing... at the time. It did some stuff that Windows and MacOS couldn't easily do performance-wise, because of its time slicing.
I remember simultaneously playing back four or five videos on BeOS at the same time without any hiccups, and you could barely do that with two videos on Windows on the same hardware. Because modern processors are so powerful, even on phones, most of the benefits I wanted out of OpenBeOS (Haiku) around 2000 no longer have value today.
I still follow Haiku's progress because of some BeOS sentimentality, but to me, it's now a novelty more than anything.
Instead, the relevancy now mostly has to do with the unity -- or rather the lack thereof -- amongst NIX operating systems. While Linux dominates the server market, the "year of the Linux desktop" that everyone's been hoping will arrive for at least a decade now hasn't arrived. Sure, there are new challengers now and again but most of the problems and criticisms of Linux aren't about the look and feel, but usually fall on a more fundamental level: "Stuff breaks and then it's impossible to fix." -- "My audio drivers don't work and this tutorial to troubleshoot it is incomprehensible to me." -- "I took some updates and now Kdenlive doesn't export audio anymore."
Haiku is very different in this respect because its underlying architecture is the one thing Linux/BSDs are not and never will be: unified. The entire system, kernel to HTTP client to file manager, is developed by one team on one infrastructure inside one git repository. Which means as a result, you always know whose fault it is when something breaks (ours), and that when we fix it, it'll appear in the "nightly" update channel by the next day. It also means that there's no long series of configuration changes to try when something doesn't work; almost universally, stuff either works or it doesn't. Really -- there's only one exception to this I can think of (relating to a bug in our port of FreeBSD's Intel WiFi drivers.)
Linux has been trying for a more unified system both up front (e.g. elementaryOS) and in back (systemd...), but the more I use it, the less I want to use it and the more I want to use Haiku.
>> the "year of the Linux desktop" that everyone's been hoping will arrive for at least a decade
Everyone might be a little hyperbolic, considering that the majority of people are satisfied with OSX, Windows and/or ChromeOS. And there are plenty of other people who are satisfied with Ubuntu and Mint as their desktops. I would counter that the number of people waiting for the "year of the Linux desktop" is probably a small number.
And of course one can be satisfied with Ubuntu and Mint as desktops. It's just that when it breaks, you really have to know your way around the plumbing -- which end users don't.
For a huge swath of *nix users, Mac OSX accomplished everything they wanted from a "Linux Desktop" outside of being free and open source. That probably leaves a very small number waiting for the Linux Desktop.
FWIW, OSX is also unified, and requires little knowledge of the plumbing for end users.
Ironically, you provided an example of this: Lots of things can qualify as an HTTP client. FreeBSD's "fetch" utility and OpenBSD's "ftp" utility are certainly among them. Those are both parts of the operating system, developed by the FreeBSD/OpenBSD developers.