Hello everyone! I'm Joseph 'Calvin' Hill, (irc nick: return0e) a third year computer science student at the University of Hull and one of the 7 GSoC students participating with Haiku. I'm also a active contributor to the HaikuPorts organisation, by porting over useful cross-platform software found on other platforms, to be made available on Haiku. This summer, I'll be porting the Swift programming language to Haiku with my mentors Jérôme Duval 'Korli' and Julian Harnath 'jua', with the intention of merging these changes upstream.
An interesting project, and good luck with it! The more languages we have on Haiku the better.
Just an observation, though. A few years ago someone ported Go. We still have it … at v1.3. Better than nothing, but Go v1.8.1 has recently been released. So the porter has moved on to other things and the port is not being maintained and upgraded. There is no Haiku Go community that has committed itself to evangelising Go usage , writing tutorials and keeping the language updated. AFAIK nobody has even bothered to compile it for x86_64. As time moves on, Go on Haiku becomes less and less compatible with what is available out there, It’s not just a programmimg issue, but also one of “human engineering”
Of course that is not your problem. You have quite enough on your plate. I’m really just putting this out there for your mentors’ consideration.
We ultimately failed the student porting Go for lack of involvement with the Haiku community back then.
As for the port, it is not even possible to build it anymore because it references multiple things that where then hosted on code.google.com. Reviving it would need to replace all those URLs by up to date ones, hosted elsewhere. This makes it difficult to make a 64bit version of it.
It may be better to start from scratch, and just use the existing port as a reference, maybe reusing parts of the code if needed.
One would have to work out if that was worth the trouble. I’m not aware that Go has gained much traction, but maybe I’m not hanging out in the right places.
Swift, on the other hand, is rapidly gaining popularity in the Apple developer community. If it can be developed on Haiku to the point where we can cross-compile Mac OSX/iOS apps just as we do QT, well, we’d double our potential apps overnight.
This is IMHO a very important GSOC project and I hope the community gets behind it.
