In the process of getting a BeBox. Mad at myself for selling my other one and hope to have one in Jan 2011. Plan is to use it in my office and also start learning how to program. I am a Mac owner so have no PC to install Haiku on other than Virtual PC on a Mac Mini and doing it virtual. Prefer to learn on BeBox anyway.
So, curious coming from a non programmer newbie, will learning to program on a BeBox running BeOS Pro 5.03 help me and be similar to creating apps with Haiku on an Intel box down the road or are the just so different?
tj
By the way, I did buy DarkWrms Programming Haiku book as it looked like a great way to learn to program.
So, going the other way, will following DarkWrms Haiku book help me learn to create programs on my BeBox?
tj
Well, the BeBox being a PPC machine, the development environment will be different. You will have to use BeIDE (which was made by a well-known Macintosh software company, Metrowerks from CodeWarriors fame) to develop.
But on source level, it’s very similar. You wont be able to use some API introduced on Haiku only, but to start learning how to program, it should not be a problem.
You still could find Be Inc. sample codes on haikuware.com or BeBits.com, which should compile fine for most of them on a BeOS R5.0.3, even a PPC one.
You should know, however, than Haiku will probably never run on a BeBox, so one day or another, you will have to move on. Why not learn progamming for Haiku directly on Haiku!?
Under emulation, if you don’t (want to?) own an Intel machine.
It will be a similar experience, but it may not be quite the same.
I wrote the examples in the book to also compile on R5 and Zeta, theoretically without any issues. I can’t run either of them any more, so they may not compile quite as cleanly as they do under Haiku. If there are any problems, they usually stem from needing to include a header or two.
As for an IDE, you’ll probably want to use BeIDE instead of Paladin. When I was still able to run R5 Intel and/or Zeta on one of my computers, I used to make sure Paladin would build cleanly, regardless of the platform. It would probably take a little tweaking to get it to compile under R5 Intel again. I have zero experience on PPC, so it would probably take a little more tweaking than usual to get it running on R5 PPC. If you use BeIDE, you shouldn’t have many problems – the major difference will be that BeIDE doesn’t have the features that Paladin does, but the workflow is pretty close now.