[haiku-development] Re: Haiku, Qt and apps, oh my!

  • From: Matt Madia <mattmadia@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 11:10:17 -0400

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 8:53 AM, Karsten Heimrich <host.haiku@xxxxxx> wrote:
> Sure i wouldn't write the Haiku About with Qt, but what about an Word
> processor? Why would you spend month, maybe years to get something going
> when you could collaborate with 10 times more devs to have a proper platform
> independent solution. Not only you as dev would gain, also the user since it
> would be tested by thousands more and thus be more stable and feature
> complete.

First, I do see the value in cross platform applications, but IMO they
simply do not have the potential to be as good as 100% native
software.  Having said that, given our very limited developer pool,
can we realistically achieve that potential for all software?  nope,
not yet.

There's a few issues with the "cross platform = more devs = better
software for Haiku" thinking.

1-Bugs and issues can be OS-specific. On top of that, the Haiku port
of $FOOBAR can see regressions due to changes made by other OS's.
This has occurred an innumerable amount of times with the BeOS-Mozilla
port. Consequently, our devs were detracted from what they were
working on in order to fix those regressions.

2-This becomes a trade-off of our level of control to freely modify
the codebase in favor of being a cross-platform app.  This is
something that varies from project to project. Some will and already
do shun Haiku and say "Port your OS to my software.".  Others are more
accepting, but no cross-platform project will give us total control.

--mmadia

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