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I ran BeOS many, many years ago on a PowerComputing Mac-clone and remember it fondly. I had high hopes that when LG acquired WebOS that perhaps some form of BeO
by im_down_w_otp 5y ago
I ran BeOS many, many years ago on a PowerComputing Mac-clone and remember it fondly. I had high hopes that when LG acquired WebOS that perhaps some form of BeOS as a general computing platform might resurface.
One question I've always had about Haiku is how faithful it is to the underlying implementation and architecture of BeOS, not so much its resultant API compatibility? Because it was the guts of BeOS which seemed to make it so special, not its component interfaces.
- Apocryphon 5y agoI've always wondered that, too. Since BeOS was never open-sourced, is Haiku more of a spiritual successor than a direct descendent?
- angus-prune 5y agoWhat is the relevence of WebOS? I thought that came from Palm OS, and I wasn't aware of any link to BeOS.
- im_down_w_otp 5y agoPalm acquired the rights to BeOS, some part of it was used as the guts of webOS for their run at the new-wave smartphone market, and then that of course was acquired by LG, which then used webOS to power some number of smart TVs. If I'm remembering correctly.
- Apocryphon 5y agoFunny, then, that even BeOS or a sliver of it lived on in a mobile operating system. See this conversation about how Linux seems to almost overwhelmingly dominate the mobile OS space, with iOS as the most significant exception. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28297544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28297544
- diskzero 5y agoThe BeOS internal architecture changed a lot from release to release. The kernel, file system, all the kits were constantly undergoing massive change and I don't think there was an ABI until release four. We broke binaries all the time! Most of the code wasn't open sourced, but it leaked and yellowTab released a version using the actual BeOS source code. The entire system compressed down to 90MB and you could ftp all.tgz and build the whole system. Looking at the architecture critically, is it a good idea to have a C++ API and have to deal with fragile base classes? I remember stuffing classes full of placeholders to create space in the vtable for future changes. BeOS was well documented and the BeBook is still nice to read. Looking at the Haiku source, I see that they have all the kits, with the same API. When I look at the source for Looper, the code is a shadowy reflection of the "real" source. It may even be much better! If Haiku feels good to use and program, then I think it is faithful to BeOS. Cyril was constantly improving the kernel, Dominic was constantly improving the filesytem, Benoit was constantly improving the window server, Pavel was constantly improving Tracker, etc. There wasn't really a dogma about what BeOS should be except fast, responsive, forward looking and fun for users and developers.
- waddlesplash 5y agoIgnoring the leaks and looking just at the officially released Tracker and Deskbar, or the FAT driver, or the filesystem cache (from the samples of the Be File System book)'s code ... I think the claim that Haiku's code is much better than BeOS' was is not really a hard one to make ;) Some of our community members who remember BeOS well and still boot it up from time to time remark that Haiku feels like a much more polished and stable system than BeOS at this point, even when using classic applications.
- im_down_w_otp 5y agoOh, I didn't mean it as an indictment of Haiku. More just an intellectual curiosity.