How stable is the ABI?

Development
1

If I compile an application on Haiku alpha, how likely is it to continue working well on Haiku beta 1?

2

If you use Haiku-specific APIs, it probably won’t. If you use GCC4, then it definitely won’t. We broke quite a lot of ABI between the alpha and the beta – with the exception of BeOS GCC2 ABI, that is.

3

However, if you compile an application on beta1, it should continue to work on beta2 and all betas until R1.
We allowed ourselves some changes before entering beta stage, but now we’re going to keep things more stable.

4

** excluding use of private APIs of course!

5

Hmm, do we have a timeline until a stable release? How many betas and release candidates will we try?

6

We’ll see enough betas to get it right, I suppose.

7

This is why I like to include my code with my programs. I know my little toys programs rarely are used by others but at-least others can compile them if they want with any Haiku.

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8

There is no fixed schedule. We will try to hold to a beta every year, and continue doing so until we have fixed all the known bugs (which may be never), or we decide it’s good enough to call it “done” and start focusing on R2 (with or without maintenance on the R1 branch, depending on available people to do the work).

Don’t wait for that, it’s perfectly fine to use the beta releases or the nightlies and report your problems. And upgrades are painless thanks to our amazing package manager.

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9

Is there a roadmap, or list of desires features/milestones, for the betas, RC’s?

10

For us a beta means “all features we want are already there”. So the roadmap is largely bugfixes.

You can look at the details here: https://dev.haiku-os.org/roadmap but you’ll have to dig into the ticket list for each milestone.

For beta2, an updated web browser, fixed intel video and hda audio drivers, and better UEFI integration would be great. But we’ll see what we have ready by september.

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