Since the last time, the expression parser has grown several new capabilities. We are now able to infer the types of operands, and as such one no longer needs to set the type that one wishes the value to be returned as. A further consequence is that expressions can now return arbitrarily typed values as results, not just simple numeric values. This means that, for instance, an expression can return a data member of a class, and if that member is itself an object or other more complex type, it can then be expanded to look at its internal values.
I am by far not knowledgeable enough to comment on any of this – but I do know it’s a number of improvements to Haiku’s debugger.
another great read is the last weekly report
http://haiku-os.org/blog/pulkomandy/2014-12-12_contract_weekly_repo…
haiku has made some great progress over the last couple weeks
This debugger is improving all the time, going to make developing on the platform a heap easier! Now for an IDE…
Those Haiku guys do amazing things. I did BeOS hackery back in the days and nostalgia creeps in.
But I can’t help but feel a bit puzzled why it takes so long to get the thing finished. The latest alpha is very buggy and they haven’t updated the ui to resemble anything modern (no, the infinitely nested menus to navigate the OS didn’t turn out to be a good feature, even in the 90’s.)
I’d like to have the BeOS ideas (the fs, the responsiveness,…), but not really an outright clone, since its ui concepts are very dated.
I wish them all the best though. Awesome work.
I like your post
and I thought I’d try to help with some of your questions and concerns:
There are very few developers, and only one of them is currently paid for full time work.
Also, Haiku is an entire operating system. This is different from Linux, which has a set of kernel developers, X developers, KDE developers, people doing package management, and so on. In Haiku, the kernel, graphics, user interface, default applications, and packages are all developed by a relatively small group of people.
Please report any bugs. They WILL get worked on!
The Haiku developers are quite open to critisisms and suggestions in regards to the user interface, as long as they are technical in nature and offer a clear improvement over the way things are currently done. Of course, patches are much more welcome than just suggestions.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a Haiku developer. I just follow the development religiously.
The “latest Alpha” is years old. Expect Beta 1 in a matter of months, or feel free to follow the nightly builds in the meantime. Beta 1 got delayed by the introduction of proper package management, among other things.
The problem with the ui is the following, is that there are users (and even developers!) who are considering it “perfect”. If you are coming with ideas to change the ui, it can happen to you, that these people start to panic and request you not to change anything since the ui is already perfect and so any change can be just bad.
There are many good technologies behind haiku, sadly the ui is the week point of haiku.
Well, so far, very few of the people “suggesting” UI changes have come up with anything but text. Contributing to the UI is the same as contributing to the code, you’ll get most traction if you actually do mockups/prototypes and _show_ what you mean.
Since there’s a limited developer base, they don’t want to get stuck up in theoretical discussions that eat up time but go nowhere….
In addition to what Ithamar said, a few other points:
1) Whether a UI is good or bad is subject to opinion in many ways.
2) Not agreeing with your personal opinion of how the UI should be is not the same as saying it’s perfect.
3) Many of the UI suggestions that come our way, yours included, can frequently be summarized as either a) a laundry list of changes that could best be described as “change the UI to be exactly like one of {KDE,Gnome,OSX,Android}”, b) add lots of useless flashy effects for the sake of it to be more trendy, which doesn’t actually make the UI better/more usable, or c) change the UI completely to be more tablet/touch friendly, which totally goes against Haiku’s goal of being a good desktop OS.
When people make more reasonable UI suggestions, they do in fact tend to get implemented; likewise, I guarantee if you go to e.g. KDE’s bugtracker/mailing lists and essentially tell them to change their UI to be exactly like GNOME’s, you’d see a similarly lukewarm response as what you’re complaining about here.
Edited 2014-12-19 16:47 UTC
Back in “the day”, there was an effort called Blue Eyed OS that was to leverage the Linux kernel and have the BeOS API on top of that. It never took off obviously, but the Haiku guys took the long route and have to implement all the drivers themselves.
It’s a losing battle. They’ll never be able to keep up with new hardware. Their best bet is to fork some “realtime” variant of the Linux kernel and go from there.
Despite the recent critics about the seemingly lack of progress or never ending alpha status (which is partly valid), I still believe Haiku can have a future.
Someday I hope to replace Linux as my main OS with Haiku.
Good work on the debugger by the way. Better development tools are a must have to attract developers and to bring the OS to the next level.
I really would like to have a proper IDE on Haiku.
With BeOS, the Metrowerks debugger for PowerPC was pretty good, the GDB based one on Intel was shocking. Nice to see this has some good movement in Haiku.
Shocking in what way? :p