[haiku-development] Re: 64 bit
- From: Simon Taylor <simontaylor1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 09:15:31 +0100
On 10 Sep 2014, at 08:44, Mark A Hayes <markarnold@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Wednesday, September 10, 2014 at 9:24 AM, "Jessica Hamilton"
> <jessica.l.hamilton@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>> BeOS R5 binary compatibility? It's pointless.
>>
>> Whether it is or not is irrelevant. This is our stated goal, and we're
>> sticking to it for R1.
>
> Sticking to it, no matter what, even as decades are starting to pass by?
>
> From your sentence above, I conclude that you would stick to this goal even
> if you did indeed think it was irrelevant, because after all, it IS a goal.
>
> I hope this logic isn't prevalent in the project…
There are no real alternatives at this point. The active developer base of
Haiku is *very* small. The only way there is a hope of getting an R1 release
out of the door is to resist the temptation to constantly move the goalposts.
Will Haiku R1 be relevant to most people? Probably not. Would having the
release be 64-bit make a difference? Also probably not. R1 is about releasing
something that works and seeing if that stirs up any interest in evolving the
ideas into a modern desktop OS. That’s not going to be easy - finding a vision
for “modern Haiku” without fragmenting the already small community is likely to
be a massive challenge (one that will require a very significant increase in
the size of that community, or a very significant investment of money from
somewhere IMHO).
There’s a lot of threads lately about Haiku needing to change this or that
aspect to be relevant. The truth is that R1 is going to be seen as “retro”
regardless of what happens under the hood. It’s going to look like BeOS and
that’s going to impact the reception people give it. Compiler/CPU etc are not
going to have a great deal of impact (regardless of the R1 configuration, gcc 4
will be supported, and the codebase itself is 64-bit clean).
So let’s just take the path of least resistance to get an R1 out of the door,
have a massive party, and then see what the mood is about the future.
Simon
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