I’ve only just discovered Haiku and I’m really impressed, I hope the project becomes a great success.
I’ve seen a posting on python-dev stating Haiku wants to support Python and I saw on YouTube the Haiku project leader declaring his fondness for the Python language so I hope you’ll consider my suggestion.
I don’t know if compiling Haiku’s widgets for use with Python on other platforms is doable but I think it could have its benefits, e.g.:
open source scripted apps already available for Haiku when it reaches v 1.0
increased developer/user familiarity with the look and feel of Haiku
It might be difficult or impossible to have Haiku’s widgets on other platforms, whether in Python or not. What is more likely is to have a nice Python API for accessing the Haiku widgets and essentially writing Haiku programs in Python (but these would only run on Haiku.)
I personally also want to see a similar library for Ruby, my scripting language of choice. Perl may also benefit from such a library.
It is probably possible to use SWIG to generate 1-to-1 bindings to all these languages from our C++ API, and then people can build on top of those to make nicer Pythonic, Rubyish and Perlish APIs (in other words ones that fit in better with each language.)
This way no matter what your favorite scripting language is, you can write some quick Haiku apps to solve your problems.
A nice addition to all these would be a GUI interface creation tool that can create GUIs which can then be programmed from all these languages (and C++ too.) This is something I am interested in researching one of these days.
Another option would be wxWidgets (http://wxwidgets.org/) which is cross-platform and has bindings for Python (wxPython - http://www.wxpython.org/) amongst others. A major advantage of wxWidgets is that it produces GUI’s that look native on all platforms. There are a already number of GUI building tools for wxWidgets (http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Tools).
All we need is a port of wxWidgets to Haiku. Some first steps have already been made: http://developer.berlios.de/projects/wxbeos/. This project seems to have stalled, however.