Hot take: I like the fact that Haiku is Posix-compliant and has the XLib compatibility layer. Native apps are all good and well, but if we ever hope to break the Mac/Windows duopoly (with Linux as the only credible alternative), it’s essential that people can run their favorite apps wherever. Otherwise they’ll just balk at the idea of switching, and rightly so. This goes double for developers, who must be able to port their applications with relative ease. No offense, but after a quarter century of using Linux, I’d find it very hard to learn the API of a whole other operating system that I can’t even use as much as I’d like.
In this spirit, lately I’ve been trying to figure out what languages and libraries already run on Haiku and can be used for portable apps:
Perl and Python, of course; they come preinstalled on Haiku, the latter complete with ncurses bindings.
likewise for C and C++, with a choice of GUI libraries including Qt, Gtk and FLTK (my favorite).
For more exotic options: Free Pascal, Nim and Vala are also ported and work fine; in fact there are several Pascal apps in HaikuDepot.
BaCon is ported too, and I think @michel has an unofficial port of FreeBasic.
other languages are available too, like Tcl/Tk or PHP, not to mention Posix staples like Awk.
Speaking of which: while a GUI with unique qualities is Haiku’s main selling point, text-based apps deserve attention too. People prefer them for all kinds of reasons, like performance and accessibility. And Haiku has a perfectly good terminal. It’s a terrible thing to waste.
(For those who do want to learn some native Haiku development, I recommend picking up Yab. It’s easier than it seems at first sight, and very nice.)
Strange you should mention that. For someone who lived through the DOS era, text-only applications have always seemed a bit of a blind spot in the FOSS world. Wordgrinder is okay, but it doesn’t come close to MS Word 5.5 or WordPerfect 6.2.
If a non-developer, but still somewhat technical, user wants to contribute in some meaningful way, trying to port apps they would want to see on Haiku is a great way imo, it’s what I’ve been doing off and on for a while now.
For this I would highly recommend using Haikuporter and getting familiarized with Haikuports.
Sure, there’s some reading involved, but once you get familiar with how it works you can pretty much turn all successful ports you do into packages for all users.
@Begasus@BiPolar are more familiar with it, pinging them in case they wanna share their perspective
Lots of languages I didn’t mention, yeah. There’s Lua, too. Embedded Common Lisp. Chicken Scheme. Ruby’s probably there, but it’s not usually on my radar.
And well… WordGrinder isn’t intended to compete with WordPerfect. It’s an old-school word processor, designed to let you write prose and little else. Was thinking more along the lines of Midnight Commander with its ability to get into zip archives and connect to FTP / SFTP sites. Both features have been invaluable to me in recent times, so having it on Haiku is super useful.
Maybe you can add this in the post for new or updated this year, had been thinking about it but since you already got the goodies it would fit right in there.
PS Neovim was added by user0-07161 a new contributor at haikuports.
