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I just feel like this project has lost track of priorities, or doesn't want to be a credible alternative OS anymore. As a long time fan of the project - who car

I just feel like this project has lost track of priorities, or doesn't want to be a credible alternative OS anymore. As a long time fan of the project - who cares about Swift? Where's the next release?

aargh_aargh 9y ago
Open source community (as opposed to corporate-sponsored open source) has never worked that way. There are different people focusing on different things. Speed of the release team has no bearing on progress of other activities. It's likely not even the same people.
yardie 9y ago
> who cares about Swift? 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
- Quequau 9y ago
  > Someone, obviously, cares. They took the time to port it. 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.
throwaway7645 9y ago
If I had to guess, it looks like someone wanted a really fast language with high level features. They could've also ported D, Rust, Nim...etc, but Swift is not a bad one to port. What is most of Haiku written in, C++? I think Swift would be a good app language now that it is Open Source.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
  I believe there is also a working Rust port. Still, more options is nice.
  - petecox 9y ago
    If they have LLVM up and running then any language that depends on it (swift, rust) should be doable.
  - steveklabnik 9y ago
    https://forge.rust-lang.org/platform-support.html https://forge.rust-lang.org/platform-support.html * i686-unknown-haiku * x86_64-unknown-haiku They're basically cross-compile only, Tier 3 supported at the moment.
    - jessic4h 9y ago
      It hasn't been packaged yet, but I've both bootstrapped rustc & cargo, and also compiled rustc & cargo on Haiku itself from the bootstrap packages, so it shall be self-hosting from here on out.
      - steveklabnik 9y ago
        Excellent!
yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
A credible OS needs applications. So ports matter, and languages matter.
bebop 9y ago
This is a Google Summer of Code project. So in essence this is an R&D project that is "free" for the community. The Haiku devs are busy working on getting a Beta 1 release that should be here real soon now. Package management is in and the infrastructure around it is being worked on.
slantyyz 9y ago
>> I just feel like this project has lost track of priorities 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.
- waddlesplash 9y ago
  It's kind of off-topic for this thread, but I think there are quite a number of arguments to be made for Haiku's continuing relevancy (although I'm clearly biased :). You're right of course about performance being much less of a big deal these days (Haiku still far outshines even Linux in efficiency, though not in raw speed, mostly due to our lack of GPU acceleration). 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.

aargh_aargh 9y ago

Open source community (as opposed to corporate-sponsored open source) has never worked that way. There are different people focusing on different things. Speed of the release team has no bearing on progress of other activities. It's likely not even the same people.

yardie 9y ago

> who cares about Swift? 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

Quequau 9y ago
> Someone, obviously, cares. They took the time to port it. 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.

throwaway7645 9y ago

If I had to guess, it looks like someone wanted a really fast language with high level features. They could've also ported D, Rust, Nim...etc, but Swift is not a bad one to port. What is most of Haiku written in, C++? I think Swift would be a good app language now that it is Open Source.

yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
I believe there is also a working Rust port. Still, more options is nice.
- petecox 9y ago
  If they have LLVM up and running then any language that depends on it (swift, rust) should be doable.
- steveklabnik 9y ago
  https://forge.rust-lang.org/platform-support.html https://forge.rust-lang.org/platform-support.html * i686-unknown-haiku * x86_64-unknown-haiku They're basically cross-compile only, Tier 3 supported at the moment.
  - jessic4h 9y ago
    It hasn't been packaged yet, but I've both bootstrapped rustc & cargo, and also compiled rustc & cargo on Haiku itself from the bootstrap packages, so it shall be self-hosting from here on out.
    - steveklabnik 9y ago
      Excellent!

yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago

A credible OS needs applications. So ports matter, and languages matter.

bebop 9y ago

This is a Google Summer of Code project. So in essence this is an R&D project that is "free" for the community. The Haiku devs are busy working on getting a Beta 1 release that should be here real soon now. Package management is in and the infrastructure around it is being worked on.

slantyyz 9y ago

>> I just feel like this project has lost track of priorities 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.

waddlesplash 9y ago
It's kind of off-topic for this thread, but I think there are quite a number of arguments to be made for Haiku's continuing relevancy (although I'm clearly biased :). You're right of course about performance being much less of a big deal these days (Haiku still far outshines even Linux in efficiency, though not in raw speed, mostly due to our lack of GPU acceleration). 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.