Haiku Final Release

Considering Haiku is written in object-oriented C++, it should be modular enough that it can be maintained better than C-based OS attempts (including successful ones). Unfortunately C++ authors made more promises of maintainability than can easily be kept using C++.

In reality, RC1 should be a locked-in ABI for all core features. Any future release-candidates should focus on bug fixing and polishing to a full release status. Good progress has been made. It’s a shame to have to hide it behind an unstable beta release.

Rabbit Trails

In the early to mid 2000’s decade I was fixated on writing a spinoff of Amos BASIC that could work on both 68k and PPC models of Amiga computers. Under the monaker of Mattathias BASIC (named after the son of the Biblical prophet Amos), my programming partner and I purseued rabbit-trail after rabbit-trail.

Ultimately some of the paradigms needed to be pursued by others using other projects:

  • AmosPro had never been object-oriented so that needed to be relegated to the AmigaE family of languages.

  • AmosPro’s tokenization algorithm was never intended to implement a portable bytecode so that needed to be relegated to WebAssembly.

  • The reusable nature of the code we tried to write lacked a competitive optimization framework, relagating that function to GCC and/or LLVM (whose documentation has been improved remarkably since then).

  • The original AmosPro worked on the Amiga multimedia chipsets so getting old source codes to recompile on modern graphics cores using shaders and 3d acceleration has been relagated to AOZ studio (written by one of the original principle authors of AmosPro).

  • This leaves the only remaining priciple of design: transpiling BASIC to another language like C++ which has been relagated to my YAB2C++ transpiler.

In closing, Mattathias was never as great as the sum of its parts because it went too many directions at once.