Learning to Program with Haiku
65 comments
·April 10, 2025interroboink
troyvit
Man I read that during my formative years as a computer guy and it helped me big-time make the switch from MacOS to Linux. That and "The Cathedral and the Bazaar."[1] I don't know how well that one stands up to the test of time though. I'm going to re-read your link now.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...
ameliaquining
The most immediately obvious answer to that question, shared by Stephenson himself, is that the essay quickly failed the test of time because it did not anticipate Mac OS X, which breaks the dichotomy of user-friendly-but-anemic Classic Mac OS vs. powerful-but-forbidding Unix.
(I personally still don't really like Apple systems and don't use them, but I think it's clear that by the standards of the time OS X squared this circle.)
troyvit
I was speaking to ESR's essay holding up to the test of time but you have a good point. I'd argue however that the lock-down Apple imposes on OS X, such as signed system volumes, keeps them firmly planted in a cathedral. That said I don't know why I'd argue with Neal Stephenson about this stuff to begin with so maybe I should stop typing :)
DeathArrow
The tutorial is from 2010. At the time people were much more enthusiastic about Haiku and other alternative operating systems.
Now we only have Windows and Unix like.
I still wonder what would have happened had Jean-Louis Gassée been less greedy and Apple acquired BeOs instead of Next.
I discovered BeOs in 2000 and it seemed to me much more interesting at that moment than either Windows or Linux. Not only it looked and felt better but it introduced other ideas and concepts.
I had hopes it's adoption will increase but it soon withered and died.
I still wonder why we can't do better than Unix and Windows. Unix is 50 years old and Windows is old, too. There should be better concepts out there waiting to be discovered and implemented.
At some point there were many companies, universities, groups and individuals involved in researching and implementing operating systems.
At that point I was following OsNews website daily and each day there were news about some new and exciting developments.
Not anymore.
I miss the days when I read about BeOS, Syllable, AROS, MorphOS, AtheOS, SkyOS, Plan 9, Inferno, Singularity. And there were a ton of interesting kernels, too.
WillAdams
I'm faintly surprised that the Raspberry Pi hasn't made OS-experimentation more of a thing.
There are:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/risc-os-for-raspberry-pi/
https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Installation
https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/Raspberry_Pi/index.html
as well as a couple of RTOS options: https://all3dp.com/2/rtos-raspberry-pi-real-time-os/ and QNX: https://pidora.ca/qnx-on-raspberry-pi-the-professional-grade...
and TRON: https://www.tron.org/blog/2023/09/post-1767/ (but that's only on the Pico? I'd love to see it as a desktop OS on an rPi5)
MisterTea
To add for Plan 9: https://9front.org/releases/
Maintained daily. pi is 32bit and pi3 is 64bit. WiFi works.
MisterTea
> I still wonder why we can't do better than Unix and Windows. Unix is 50 years old and Windows is old, too. There should be better concepts out there waiting to be discovered and implemented.
Plan 9. It's a Unix built on top of a network. Each process can be thought of as a container as each gets a namespace which consists of a table of mounts and binds of resources. Those resources are served by an architecture neutral RPC protocol which serves a tree of objects we call files: 9P. The server of these resources is called a file server and is akin to a micro-service that runs bare metal on the CPU, the kernel is the container host. These resources are protected by Unix permissions verified by the kernel against a security service called factotum, itself a 9P server. Cloud ready, bare metal micro-service computing started in the late 80's and nobody noticed.
> I miss the days ... Plan 9, Inferno, ...
Still alive and kicking. Head over to 9front.org for a maintained fork of each. Patches arrive nearly daily to 9front and the community is encouraged to contribute. 9front also runs my home network because setting up DHCP, DNS and TFTP for PXE is dumb simple.
terhechte
Just wanted to say that I was only someone who read OsNews daily back somewhere from 2002 to 2007 or 2008. So many interesting things going on.
With the proliferation of web apps and containers, alternative operating systems are actually more feasible today. At the same time, I'm dependent on all the niceties that the macOS/iOS ecosystem offers (the integration, the sync). Something I wanted to look into is just running macOS in a very default way and then using a fast OS (such as Haiku, though their Arm64 support is not very good yet) in a fullscreen VM. With modern Apple Silicon, there's almost no performance penalty.
ForHackernews
There is still new exciting stuff happening
lproven
Trad Unix, redone in C++; not self-hosting; project lead has quit to work on a browser.
Interesting but mainly for extreme smallness. Forth will alienate a lot of people. For me, Oberon would have been a more interesting basis.
Hostile fork of Menuet OS; based on 25YO code.
I mean, yes, it is good there's interesting stuff, but these are not inspiring examples IMHO.
anthk
Risc OS it's still alive, it works great under an RPI B+ and up. Just get some industrial graded SD.
I suggest you to get the Risc OS Direct 'distro' and then the update which has wireless support. Read the documentation first, of course.
Risc OS it's very similar to Windows in usage (more like an Amiga), once you read the docs you will get it ready in no time. You have the old Netsurf browser on its native plataform, it's fun.
On plan9, 9front superseded it.
flohofwoe
> I still wonder what would have happened had Jean-Louis Gassée been less greedy and Apple acquired BeOs instead of Next.
Nothing different would have happened. You would have used C++ instead of Objective-C to write macOS UI programs, but other then that macOS would be in the same shitty state it as is today (assuming a wildly popular iPhone would also have happened in that alternative timeline and take the focus away from desktop UI development).
One thing might probably be different: macOS might be less popular amongst developers because BeOS wasn't a UNIX clone (but 'Linux on the desktop' might actually be in a better state).
os2warpman
>I still wonder what would have happened had Jean-Louis Gassée been less greedy and Apple acquired BeOs instead of Next
Internal efforts to get BeOS's security levels up to even Mac OS 9 levels would have bankrupted 1997 Apple.
z3phyr
Most of the developers of the microcomputer revolution era programmed in Non-Unix environments.
Even in workstation space, the cool lisp/smalltalk/... developers hated unix, but the small market was filled with unixes.
Even today, most of the native developers use windows!
b800h
Yes, this - OS X wouldn't have become a near-ubiquitous developer desktop. That would have been very bad for Apple.
anthk
The rest of the world doesn't use OSX for all.
graemep
Really? Most users I have come across are not developers. A high proportion of developers use it, but the proportion of users who are developrrs is quire low.
kitd
OS/2 was created by the biggest computer company in the world at the time, yet even it couldn't get enough traction.
In the world of OSes, "the same as what everyone else is using" is much more important than "new takes on old concepts".
pjmlp
Of course, when it was more expensive than MS-DOS 5/Windows 3.1 combo hardware requirements, what to expect.
In today's money, going with OS/2 instead would have cost me 1000 euros more when I bought my 386 PC.
piokoch
It came a few years to early. I remember my shock when I get [1] my OS/2 copy and it was on 10 (yes, ten!) 3.5 inch Floppy Disk, while Windows needed two (one for main OS, one for some utilities).
[1] This was 1987 still communistic Poland, so I bought a pirated copy on a famous Warsaw computer bazaar on Grzybowska street.
lproven
I don't think you are remembering correctly.
> It came a few years to early. I remember my shock when I get [1] my OS/2 copy and it was on 10 (yes, ten!) 3.5 inch Floppy Disk
Not so bad, really.
> while Windows needed two (one for main OS, one for some utilities).
No version of Windows came on 1 floppy.
Windows 1.01 took 4 360k disks -- here's a picture:
https://www.firstversions.com/2015/05/microsoft-windows.html
Windows 2 took 8 360k disks:
https://archive.org/details/microsoft-windows-v2.0
Windows 3 took 8 even on DS DD 720kB disks:
https://archive.org/details/windows_3.00_english_with_ms-dos...
By Windows 95 it was up to 27 high density 1.4MB disks:
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/uopb1n/t...
10 is not bad at all for a full preemptive multitasking x86-32 OS with a GUI, IMHO.
sixothree
Agreed. Their timing was not right. But once Windows 95 hit, it was over. Also, the RAM requirements made it pretty much impossible for people to recommend to their friends and family.
I really had a special fondness for OS/2. But using it today, it really is a quirky thing. Maybe if it had won I wouldn't be thinking that way.
7thaccount
I too long for different ways of interacting with a computer.
Unfortunately, I think the ship may have sailed as it's getting too hard to both start from scratch and also provide support for everything from a web browser to drivers and so on. It was a lot easier when the to do list was 1/100th the size. The workaround is to utilize what has already been done, but then that kind of defeats the entire purpose and you just get a slightly different flavor of the same thing.
The only other real option would be a radical revision of what a computer is. Something really simple that maybe a bit closer to what Carl Sasserath was doing with iOS (no, not Apple iOS, but the internet OS via Rebol thing) iirc, or what the Forth folks do with hardware. I think Alan Kay may have talked about this as well from a smalltalk perspective. The question is if you can do anything interesting with it. I'm sure there are dozens of us that would give up YouTube and social media to have a fully understandable computing system :)
DeathArrow
>It was a lot easier when the to do list was 1/100th the size
Things in the past look simple only if we look at them through today's lens.
The apparent complexity was the same.
Today I work with microservices, on top of Kubernetes on top of cloud services and I have to know a gazillion things. But I don't have the feeling that I had an easier time when I was a kid playing with C/C++ under DOS, learning assembly, writing terminate and stay resident programs, trying to write simple device drivers or trying to program the graphics hardware using whatever limited info I had access to. When I started doing desktop application using Win32 and Qt, it didn't seemed more simple than now. Learning how to use Linux syscalls, how to program for X11 in 2000 didn't seem simpler.
Of course, software was much more simpler but now we have better tools, a lot of more easy accessible information, we have developed practices, standards and methodologies to help. And since we have huge resources, we don't have to extract every last drop of performance from the hardware.
So, I don't think the life of average programmer in 70s,80s,90s,2000 was easier than now.
It only seems easy if we have to resolve problems from 40 years ago using the knowledge, tools and the hardware we have now.
7thaccount
We may be talking past each other.
I don't think it is harder on programmers now (or easier for programmers in the past). I can do things in Python that would make me a 10x programmer 40 years ago if the hardware could have supported it. They also didn't have stack overflow back then...just a dog-eared copy of some old C book. They didn't have hardware like we do that would've made a supercomputer back then look like something you'd put in a toaster today (that was a poorly worded sentence...sorry). The challenges they faced were numerous.
My point is that the actual complexity layers are much worse now. Back in the Commodore 64 days, many users knew the machine inside and out. They could program in assembly, do graphics on the display...etc, all while understanding exactly what is going on. None of that was easy or as efficient as what I can do in Excel today or some 3D graphics program, but it was something you could wrap your head around. Today, we have huge monolithic amounts of code or hardware for everything. I don't understand anything about my hardware, I don't understand the millions of lines of windows, I don't understand the millions of lines in Microsoft Office, or how my web browser works or how Unreal engine was built...etc. It's the product of millions of people working together to create something beyond the limits of a single human.
If we wanted to truly start from scratch, there's no way (that I can see) where we can reinvent all of that and actually get a large amount of users. It's not impossible, but Herculean. You could do something if the to-do list was MUCH smaller, like what was done with Temple OS or Collapse OS.
jodrellblank
> "I too long for different ways of interacting with a computer."
Like what?
People built chording/pen/handwriting/gesture/Kinect/Wiimotes/multitouch/mouse gesture/swipe gesture/joysticks/Griffin Powermate/3Dconnextion Spacemouse/motion tracking/eye tracking/voice recognition/etc. on current operating systems, what do you want in the way of interaction that couldn't be built with a current OS?
7thaccount
I'm not talking about hardware devices. I'm talking about a very different combination of OS, hardware, and how applications are made and shared. Something closer to a Lisp/Smalltalk OS I guess, but that isn't really right either. Windows is a turd and Linux/Mac aren't perfect either. Sometimes I feel like it's turds all the way down. A lot of this is just my ignorance and hubris (I admit that), but I also feel like we somehow got off on the wrong foot and now we've built this terrifying and brittle tower of complexity.
tialaramex
Because Haiku has taken such an extraordinarily long time, as with a city centre that was constructed over multiple centuries we can see the clear lines of new work with new techniques and materials on top of old work done in a way that was usual at the time.
Haiku has a lot of C++ 98 code or even pre-standard C++, not least all the stuff re-used with permission from BeOS. As was usual for projects at that time many fundamental building blocks are provided rather than using a language standard. For example there's BString and BList.
Haiku also has seams of BSD code where there'd be a project to do Whatever (WiFi, TLS, drivers, etc.) "properly" in a way unique to Haiku but as a stop gap here's some BSD code until we finish our own proper solution, which of course never happens.
waddlesplash
> with new techniques and materials on top of old work done in a way that was usual at the time.
But is there any long-lived project for which this isn't true? Linux and the BSDs surely have many components that fall into this category.
> For example there's BString and BList.
BString is a much nicer string class to work with (IMO) than std::string. It lacks some modern conveniences, and it has some unfortunate footguns where some APIs return bytes and some return UTF-8 characters (the former should probably all be considered deprecated, indeed that's a BeOS holdover), but I don't think there's any intent to drop it.
BList could be better as well, but it's still a nicer API in many ways than std::vector. Our other homegrown template classes also are nicer or have particular semantics we want that the STL classes don't, so I don't think we'd ever drop them.
> Haiku also has seams of BSD code where there'd be a project to do Whatever (WiFi, TLS, drivers, etc.) "properly" in a way unique to Haiku
What would be the point of implementing WiFi drivers from scratch "uniquely" for Haiku? Even FreeBSD has started just copying drivers from Linux, so that may be in our future as well. I don't know that anyone ever really considered writing a whole 802.11 stack for Haiku; there was some work on a "native" driver or two at one point, but it was for hardware that we didn't have support for from the BSDs, and it still used the BSD 802.11 stack. Writing our own drivers there just seems like a waste of time; we might as well contribute to the BSD ones instead.
tialaramex
> But is there any long-lived project for which this isn't true?
I don't think any other project like this exists. You're coming up on your 25th anniversary without shipping the release software !
I see that BString itself also uses this weird phrase "UTF-8 character". That's not a thing, and rather than just being technically wrong it's so weird I can't tell what the people who made it thought they meant or what the practical consequences might be.
I mean, it can't be worse than std::string in one sense because hey at least it picked... something. But if I can't figure out what that is maybe it's not better.
UTF-8 has code units, but they're one byte, so distinguishing them from bytes means either you're being weird about what a "byte" is or more likely you don't mean code units.
Unicode has characters, but well lets quote their glossary: "(1) The smallest component of written language that has semantic value; refers to the abstract meaning and/or shape, rather than a specific shape (see also glyph), though in code tables some form of visual representation is essential for the reader’s understanding. (2) Synonym for abstract character. (3) The basic unit of encoding for the Unicode character encoding. (4) The English name for the ideographic written elements of Chinese origin. [See ideograph (2).]"
So given BString is software it's probably working in terms of something concrete. My best guesses (plural, like I said, I'm not sure and I'm not even sure the author realised they needed to decide):
1. UTF16 code units. This is the natural evolution of software intended for UCS-2 in a world where that's not a thing, our world.
2. Unicode code points. If you were stubbornly determined to keep doing the same thing despite the fact UCS2 didn't happen, you might get here, which is tragic
3. Unicode scalar values. Arguably useful, although in an intensely abstract way, the closest thing a bare metal language might attempt as a "character"
4. Graphemes. Humans think these are a reasonable way to cut up written language, which is a shame because machines can't necessarily figure out what is or is not a grapheme. But maybe the software tries to do this? There have been better and worse attempts.
I don't love std::vector but I can't see anything to recommend BList at all, it's all using type erased pointers, it doesn't have the correct reservation API, it provides its own weird sorting - which doesn't even say whether it's a stable sort,
waddlesplash
It's Unicode code points. I don't know why you say this is "tragic", it's a logical unit to work in here.
GoblinSlayer
I suppose it means text encoding is known to be UTF-8.
ktallett
This was how I relearned to program in C++ and ported a few apps to the OS. It was a great experience and the OS has come on leaps and bounds. If anything for many it could be a daily driver nowadays.
Aldipower
This a a great tutorial! Very easy to read and understand. If someone would like to dive into C programming I would suggest this.
10729287
That's exactly what I wanted to read and was about to ask. I always wanted to both contribute to FOSS beyond helping with translation and to learn coding. That seems to be the perfect opportunity to check those two boxes as I've got a lot of sympathy for the Haiku os.
sverhagen
Kindly disagree. You are either an experienced programmer, in which case this starts off way too basic, or you are coming into programming for the first time, in which case: why would an average person start with C++ or whatever Haiku is?!
Aldipower
Nope, if you read carefully, I've wrote "dive into C programming". This does not target first time programmers. But this doesn't mean you are an experienced programmer already. Fair enough, I've meant C++, not C. :-) I think this tutorial is perfect for kind of beginners, but not complete novices of course.
codr7
I was really into BeOS for a few years, right around the Intel pivot.
Very nice OS, but I remember the programming API to be tricky since everything was multi-threaded.
revskill
But i already know how to program, then why do i need Haiku ?
Hj8Rd2Qw
[flagged]
dddw
There is so much love and attention to Haikus
Somewhat tangential: this reminded me of Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" [1] which speaks highly of BeOS.
I liked the bug report "R4: BeOS missing megalomaniacal figurehead to harness and focus developer rage" (:
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt