I want to change to Haiku... and what i need

you can always go with ReactOS if you want to stick with win32, but Haiku isn’t that. If you want to programm native applixations you will have to learn C++ eventually.

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Binder in unreleased BeOS BeIA provided capabilities to provide JavaScript components in C++ similar to ActiveX.

Re:Writing DLLs

On Haiku, each program is fully reentrant due to shared PIC format. This allows multiple copies of a particular program to share the same executable in memory. As such, there isn’t much difference between an executable and a .so (shared object) library. This allows the caches to work better and the RAM to be used more efficiently also.

The original 32-bit Windows DLL format wasn’t so great in that regard. It would reload a new copy of the DLL every time it was used, thus wasting RAM, increasing swapfile usage and ultimately making caches thrash heavily also. That’s why the original 32-bit versions of Windows prior to the .NET versions were dog-slow compared to their competitors like BeOS and Linux. Of course Haiku is based on the BeOS lineage and is faster than modern bloat written for Linux now too.

I actually dont need to learn C++ :slight_smile: … I know C++ very well … it is just not productive for me - not a business case ???

I think it is the same for PE and ELF. Section data is kept shared until modified by relocations or running code. Code section is usually position-independent and can be shared between processes.

It may be some problems with 32 bit x86 position-independent code because 32 bit x86 don’t fully support it and need some hacks.

PECOFF and COFF are not the same. I was referring to the original version.

I mean PE format used in 32 and 64 bit Windows introduced in Windows NT and 95.

PECOFF is newer than COFF. The PE version was updated in anything newer than XP. I’m probably dating myself badly.

No, PE format if not modified since Windows 95. It is the same in Windows 95, NT 3.1 and Windows 11. There are two variations of format: 32 bit and 64 bit that difference in sizes and layout of some fields.

COFF was never used in Windows.

Oh, ok. Sorry about the mixup.

PE format is also used in BeOS R3 x86.

Primary differences between PE and ELF are:

  1. Symbol lookup method. PE use module and symbol name pair for lookup. So it is possible to have some function with the same name exported from 2 different modules and it will not cause conflict. It allows to use multiple C/C++ runtimes in one process for example. ELF use only symbol name for lookup, no module name is specified. If use quite tricky rules to define imported module search order. Later symbol versioning mechanism was introduced. PE symbol resolution method is much easier.

  2. Relocations. PE use very primitive relocations. It supports only image relative relocations and writing imported symbol addresses to specific table. ELF have complex relocations that allows various manipulations on module before running.

PE format is simpler in general.

Believe me - i was trying this too :wink: … but compiling something on ReactOS actually can deliver you an Error on Win32
WoW64 is a bottleneck in therms of processing 32bit code … it definitly doesnt make sense processing 32bit code via WoW64 on a Win64-System.

  • WoW64 just is able processing 32bit Code serial ! … it means that you almost run 32bit code on a 64bit multicore machine with 10-20% CPU :))))

  • WoW64 is able adressing very basic COM-controls … but more complex controls WoW64 is not adressing right

  • I strongly recommend just not using a Windows 64bit System for Windows32 Code

On Haiku something like a middleware concept is needed which very obviously is not existing

Who is trying to port Gambas to Haiku ??? … that is defintily the way i would go here … but it is very needed too that then it is possible writing libaries in C++ for Gambas

/doc/benchmark - Gambas Documentation - Gambas is not competetive to f.e. python??? - but who cares, if you can write libaries in Assembler, C,C++ … thats the normal business workcase

Is (a port of) this something that would be of any use to you?

no … i strongly would recommend leaving DLLs there where they should be …on an old Win32 System.

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Haiku’s software catalog (the depot) offers most of the things needed so far, with Qt, GTK3, SDL … pretty much is around to create a new port for eventual missing applications that are around (open source).

For fast replies and help I recommend you to join the Haiku channel!

You can join the Haiku channel here:
General discussion (on and off-topic) for the Haiku community

You can re-read the IRC chat logs here:

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Re: something like photoshop, have you tried ArtPaint? It’s still a long way from photoshop, but it’s got a lot of potential and a couple of us are trying to improve it.

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Would be great to see Refraction (formerly Inferno) get open sourced.

Yeah, it was a nice app. Actually, it has been discussed before here.
It’s not always worthy in terms of money as people often want to get a last revenue for it.
Even when they do it for free, it can take time to convince all people who wrote a piece of code. At the end, it isn’t worthy either in terms of effort when the soft is too old as it can take ages to bring the code up to date, to fix things, to make the few improvements necessary for nowadays use, etc.
But you never know; we have seen more crazy things happening around here.

No … i am actually still a Win32 user - just figuring out whether I can do just the same on Haiku, what i am already able to do on Win32 … on Win64 i am not able:))) … so … better to find a decision here.

I also just could stay on a Win32 PC … but for what i do i just need a Desktop PC and not a platform which is frequented by billions people around the world.