I have been out of the BeOS loop for a while and recently noticed Zeta went down. Haiku, being open source seems like it has a good chance for continued future development. Since Haiku does not have access to the original BeOS code I am wondering if Haiku is intened to duplicate the actual media performance of BeOS or just the look and feel of the OS. I was watching some of the old video demonstrations of BeOS and forgot how amazing the OS was at managing multiple movies etc. Would be amazing the get the OS running fully optimized on computer hardware out today. Anyways just wondering about the goal of the project and if Haiku is intented to acheive this level of performance one day.
I can’t really speak for the developers, but I suspect that Haiku will definitely surpass the performance of BeOS.
Haiku already is quite fast - boot times are measured in seconds, it’s built for multithreading just like BeOS was.
Just today, we demo’d 7-8 simultaneous videos playing back on an HP laptop under Haiku - even in the current state, Haiku is capable of this type of performance already. I suspect as the kernel is optimized (a new scheduler for example) additional hardware driver support is added (accelerated video for example) it will only get better.
I think performance is a top priority for all the developers, including myself. In fact I want to make sure Haiku performs well on older hardware as well.
Also with its heavily multi-threaded architecture Haiku is ideal for the new multi-core machines, whereas other operating systems do not have as much of a “multi-threaded culture”, especially for end-user applications.
I work on Haiku because I don’t want to be relegated to using a system like Windows Vista which takes a shiny new, extremely fast multi-core machine and makes it feel like a 1999 Pentium 2. Maybe Vista is doing a bunch of useful things to make it seem so slow, but I doubt it and suspect it is more likely spending CPU cycles trying to lock the user out of their own computer with DRM, etc.
That is not a system I want to embrace as part of my computing future. But Haiku is.
I’m not worried about performance. R5 was highly optimized and Haiku is not, but there isn’t a major performance difference. I would venture to say that most of the speedups will be found in the app_server and the kernel, neither of which are optimized much, if at all AFAIK. Many people loved BeOS’ speed, including our developers. I wouldn’t be concerned if I were you. 
I think just by the nature of BeOS/Haiku and the current developers the code is probably more optimized than other OSs without even thinking about it.
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I am using Haiku ( Walter Revision 21990 ) and Opera (Build 3.62.0.2000-11-22/14:59:31, BeOS). Remember, This is PRE ALPHA SOFTWARE.
At this point Haiku runs a little slower than my BeOS MAX or Zeta installs on the same machine, but it still runs circles around Windows 2000 , Ubuntu Linux, or Syllable installs. I believe that when we are closer to R1, Haiku will be even faster and more stable than BeOS R5.
Corrected spelling.