I don’t think Haiku, inc would want to fund porting of non-native apps, indeed. And as shown in the screenshots, it already runs anyway
Being myself a vim user, I don’t feel the need for an IDE. I also discussed this with some other devs, and they did not like the idea of “integrated” in IDE much. When you think about it, it goes somewhat against what I mentionned above: the strength of Haiku is the ability to combine small apps, GUI or CLI, and build your own workflow.
An application that goes a little in this direction in the application development area is Paladin. It is just a project manager, and relies on an external editor to edit the files, and on a makefile to build them. There is more work to do, for example we should get DontWorry / BeHappy working on Haiku again for easy access to the API documentation (Qt-Assistant like). We should also investigate porting YouCompleteMe or some other similar engine that would provide intelligent code completion in text editors - maybe as a generic input method. And, we should work on that “session” thing to allow you to save all the windows of your project, from these 3 or 4 different apps, in a single project file that you can easily reopen later. And let’s add the Aukland Layout Editor for GUI design, maybe.
Well, at least this is my vision of things, and QtCreator does not fit in very well, being a monolithic app. You can see they are aware of the problem, as for example they have a “vim” mode in their editor (which didn’t come anywhere close to the real thing last time I tried it - but that was a few years ago).
Building a workflow with small applications means it is easy to replace or update just one of them at a time, allowing for more competition. When there is one big app doing everything, suddenly, all competitors must re-implement all of its features, and cannot replace just one small part of it, even if they do it 100 times better.
I agree with most of your points, and it makes sense that a number of small apps can be combined in the “Haiku way” to make a development environment.
However, I think that the Paladin/Pe combo (which I try and use) is missing:
As @humdinger mentioned, syntax hilighting. Language based syntax hilighting is relatively trivial. However, I don’t know how the Pe/Paladin combo would be able to offer hilighting based on other files/classes in the project as somehow it would need to be able to talk to Paladin/whatever process is generating an AST of the files and storing/retrieving it on disk.
Debugging support. I’ve been spolit with Visual Studio and IntelliJ; I can sprinkle breakpoints inside the code and when execution hits that point I can check locals, watches, stacks, and change the “run from” point. I would dearly love to see the same support if the Debugger could be wired up to Paladin/Pe so I could double click a line inside the Debugger when it hits a breakpoint and see it inside Pe. Of course, this would require modifications to Pe to allow me to add breakpoints.
Please note that if this is already supported, and I’ve missed it, then I apologise and please point me in the right direction!
My main thought process here is making life as easy as possible for developers to adopt to Haiku. If someone with a few hours a week can spin up a development environment, hop line by line through code they’ve written to see where things don’t work and fix it, then I believe we will make more headway in solving Haiku’s issues.
You cannot set the breakpoints in the editor, but you can when running your debug build with Debugger. It’ll save those breakpoints etc. and they’ll again be available with your next build interation.
Double-clicking on a line in Debugger opens the source file in your editor.
Have a look at the Debugger docs.
we’ve got LLVM/Clang, but only v3.8 and this requires v3.9, gdb we already have and QTWEbEbgine could be abstracted from Qupzilla?
Just out of interest, I grabbed the source to see how a quick-and-dirty compile would go. It gets a long way, but crashes when it tries to compile its sqlite module. Still, we’ll see what 3Deyes comes up with.
In Qt 4.x days, Qt used QtWebKit, which is a port of WebKit to the Qt infrastructure. In Qt5, they switched to QWebEngine, which is based on Google’s Blink (the engine running Chrome) instead.
QtWebKit is still maintained on a 3rd party github fork (not by us!), but applications are switching to QWebEngine one after the other, which means we will have to port that as well.
I want to use Haiku as my daily driver but the biggest hurdle is Web+, it’s such as crashy piece of software, particularly on pages with video (I’m looking at you, youtube). A word processor would be nice but google docs works OK, if I can keep the thing from crashing.
@johnblood, I use Haiku in an Oracle VM and natively on an Intel i3 3220 desktop. I’ve liked BeOS since v4.5 was released and was disappointed when Be decided to change its focus to Internet Appliances.
I’ve recently returned to the BeOS/Haiku scene. I originally left BeOS because the web browser became too obsolete. A web browser is the primary App that I use, and it was nice to discover that WebPositive works fairly well and even has some Java support now. To me a killer App is a current web browser.
In a virtual machine, mostly. I have a few open source works in progress that I want to work on everything, Haiku included (and most likely Windows excluded because it just has to be the special snowflake of OSes and I’m not rewriting half of my programs just for it).
I have played around with Haiku on real hardware though, running a full install from USB on my laptop (which worked surprisingly well). I’d probably use it more if I had an old Thinkpad or something to spare.
The OS has a long way to go before it can replace macOS or Linux on my machine, but it’s interesting. WebPositive works pretty well but Safari still wins by a mile so my browsing still takes place in macOS. And I haven’t gotten around to see if Python 3 works on Haiku so I still do that in macOS or Linux
I run Haiku exclusively on bare metal for most of my routine desktop situations such as light web browsing, IRC, and listening to music streams. My desktop is a fairly meager machine from 2006 but it’s been customized to be as silent as possible. I’ve only been using Haiku for a few months now but it has been very enjoyable. For me it is computing for the sake of relaxing. The killer app for me would have to be Vision, I really love IRC and it is a good client.
I use it on my old laptop Samsung N150. It used to run smooth, but recently it started working slow and there are many errors. I like Haiku as it fills the gap between high performance but non-user friendly OS and sluggish but user friendly. I would be so happy if it would get more popular.
At the same time, I hate MS, especially their support, so much, that I would do everything to stop using their products.
Unfortunately, Haiku is still too unstable to use it as a daily driver and has too many bugs.
