I love #HaikuOS for many big and small things that are really innovative and well thought out. However, there is one critical flaw it has, that essentially prevents it to ever get out of the curiosity niche: a C++ based API. Bindings are rare and rather sad, no support for modern languages either. Essentially, this means you have to know C++, if you want to make any efficient native apps with the UI, and this is a long-term deal-breaker for me at least.
@vazub a solid c++ api is a big plus for my taste. 😉
i also wouldn't say that it is dated in any way. but i get what you're saying, what would be the your lang of preference?
@ottona It is not about being dated, but rather about a stack lock-in. C++ is a rather poor choice for language interoperability due to non-standardized ABI (name mangling et al.), and the lack of other language APIs or at least hassle-free binging generation is a roadblock here.
I would like to be able to write native Haiku apps in #golang and #ziglang for example (nevermind that thev have not been ported yet - it is a different story), and I doubt that will ever happen on #HaikuOS
@vazub i know haiku and its design principles too little. language interop's apparently not part and i agree with your points of c++'s shortcomings here.
although, if one of haiku's ideas was creating an os that's light, performant and keeping a small resource footprint the language decision would make a lot of sense.
@vazub as a jaded C++ slinger, #CPP as an interface doesn't seem much of a minus. The #HaikuOS devs themselves have never seemed to be overly class-oriented, e.g. their new network API in beta is said to be all in only on the engineering features of C++17. It looks like you would like a non-C++ statically-compiled language suited to application development. I am not sure if #Zig is, I'd only fancy implementing internals in it. What other kind of language?
@ottona
@tetrislife @ottona Zig is such a language, as well as Go. If one of these were supported on API level, that would already be a huge improvement.