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

  • From: Donn Cave <donn@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2009 11:19:50 -0700 (PDT)

Quoth "Jorge G. Mare" <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
...
> If you now want to take Haiku in a different direction because you think
> it will be easier to get apps that way or because you want to make
> money, that's fine. But that's the definition of focus shift, is it not? :)

Well, that seems to be the key point.

Anyone could guess that with enough interest in Haiku, there will be
various attempts to support non-native APIs.  It isn't really something
we could vote on, it's just the way life is.  Discussion of API XYZ's
good and bad points could be weeks of fun, but will have little
influence on the XYZ enthusiasts and would miss this point: what's
Haiku's direction?  Can it even have one, the way it relies on
contributed efforts?

For me, it's probably enough to know that the native API continues to
fully support the OS, which I think we could say is a given.

The rest will have to depend on the rigors of natural selection.  If
someone manages to write a useful application directly to the Be API,
for example, then no doubt it will have the virtues we hope for, and
other applications written to these non-native APIs may indeed show
the ultimate folly of that approach.

My own interest here has already been brought up, I see - non-native
languages, i.e., Python etc. instead of C++.  I actually never thought
of Bethon as a way to bring Python applications to BeOS - there really
weren't any at the time, but really the opposite.  Supposing that
Python is a more productive language, then the small pool of people
engaged in BeOS native development could more easily fill some of
the application gaps.  Or not - the premise is debatable, but the
only real point in debating it here would be, could core development
do anything to make it easier to generate bindings to other languages?
Short of that, existence of or interest in a language binding doesn't
seem like a focus shift to me.

        Donn

(who by the way is writing from a Haiku native but not C++ IMAP mail
application.)

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