Hi. I’m a new user of Haiku, coming from windows. I like the ui and love how integrated everything feels. It’s a more pleasant experience than what I’ve had with linux.
I’m an ignorant person, but at some point I’d like to develop software. I tend to be drawn to niche languages like racket and red. On windows or linux, this isn’t an issue. On Haiku, I know these languages aren’t currently supported, but I don’t know about in the future.
While I understand support for that sort of thing is far from a top priority, I think people willing to spend time on relatively obscure languages are more likely to be interested in a relatively obscure operating system.
So, at least to get command line support, how much work would be involved in adding support for a non-c based language?
There’s a big number of non-c languages already supported.
You can see them here: https://github.com/haikuports/haikuports/tree/master/dev-lang
As Haiku is mostly POSIX-compliant,porting the compilers of even more other languages is absolutely possible as long as you only do command line stuff with it.
Sometimes it’s as easy as compiling the source code,sometimes a few patches are needed to work with different librarys and the different folder structure.
Unfortunately both Racket and Red aren’t ported to Haiku yet,but if you want to work on it,you could try compiling their source as a first step and see what happens.
If it compiles successfully and doesn’t crash,you’ll get command line support out of the box.
Making a GUI with other languages is more work,however.
Haiku has its own GUI toolkit in C++ and you need to write bindings for it to create native Haiku applications in your favorite language.
Alternatively you could also use Qt bindings if your language supports that as Qt is available on Haiku,but that’s not really a native Haiku application then.
I spent many time with racket, but it always crashing as soon as the generated racket binary trying to compile racket files. I am however not a real developer, so maybe i made something silly. Contact me in pm if you need any other info.
Forgot to mention i dont know anything about racket other than it is something scheme like, i have attempted to port because back then there was no scheme port for Haiku and it seemed the easiest way as it doesnt need an existing scheme implementation.
So tldr: i messed with it because i had too much time.
Feel free to take my patches and evolve it into a fully functional port
Compiling red either needs a cross compiler, or rebol interpreter. According to haikuporter, rebol is broken at least for x86-64. So I guess rebol would need to be ported first.
