1. Haiku OS and Euphoria
- Posted by GreenEuphorian Jan 11, 2014
- 2228 views
- Last edited Jan 12, 2014
Hi
What are the chances that Euphoria may target the Haiku platform in the near future?
Thanks
2. Re: Haiku and Euphoria
- Posted by BRyan Jan 11, 2014
- 2244 views
Hi
What are the chances that Euphoria may target the Haiku platform in the near future?
Thanks
I doubt that the Haiku platform will be supported because it is not a main stream OS.
Unless you or some other person is dedicated and invests the time and energy.
3. Re: Haiku OS and Euphoria
- Posted by GreenEuphorian Jan 11, 2014
- 2173 views
- Last edited Jan 12, 2014
Hi
What are the chances that Euphoria may target the Haiku platform in the near future?
Thanks
I doubt that the Haiku platform will be supported because it is not a main stream OS.
Unless you or some other person is dedicated and invests the time and energy.
Let me rephrase the question, then. How difficult, do you think, it would be to port Euphoria to Haiku? Any particular pitfalls to watch out for?
4. Re: Haiku and Euphoria
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Jan 11, 2014
- 2180 views
How difficult, do you think, it would be to port Euphoria to Haiku? Any particular pitfalls to watch out for?
I doubt it'd be too hard to get an initial port going. BeOS supported gcc and the entire set of unix tools, and I suspect it has a POSIX library inside. This is pretty much all that is needed to get Euphoria to run on another UNIX platform.
5. Re: Haiku and Euphoria
- Posted by mattlewis (admin) Jan 11, 2014
- 2159 views
How difficult, do you think, it would be to port Euphoria to Haiku? Any particular pitfalls to watch out for?
I doubt it'd be too hard to get an initial port going. BeOS supported gcc and the entire set of unix tools, and I suspect it has a POSIX library inside. This is pretty much all that is needed to get Euphoria to run on another UNIX platform.
Yes. I don't know much about Haiku, but you might need to play around a little seeing whether it's more Linux or BSD-like. I suspect it's more BSD-like than Linux-like.
Matt
6. Re: Haiku OS and Euphoria
- Posted by GreenEuphorian Jan 12, 2014
- 2112 views
I believe a strong case could be made for porting Euphoria to Haiku.
Most applications on the Haiku OS are programmed in C++, which is off limits for beginners and hobby programmers. While there are also other languages that have been ported to Haiku, none of them is really used much, except for yab (an adaptation of Yabasic for Haiku). And here comes the point: Euphoria fits perfectly in yab's niche. It is interpreted, newbie-friendly, simple and ideal for beginners. Moreover, Euphoria is much more developed than yab, much faster and much more powerful. Yab's success (compared to other languages on Haiku) owes much to the fact that it provides built-in bindings to Haiku's native GUI, so a total newbie can easily write a silly program with all GUI elements (windows, buttons, tabs, etc.) in half an hour. On the other hand, complex programs have also been written in yab. Another aspect of yab's attractiveness (as well as of all BASIC dialects) is its readability and ease of use. Euphoria has nothing to envy in this regard.
For those of you who are not yet familiar with the Haiku OS, I strongly advise you to have a look at it. I strongly believe that Euphoria would have great chances of being adopted as the choice language for Haiku's beginner/hobby programmers. Of course, this is not to put down Euphoria's capabilities, which are much more extended.
Moreover, yab has not been developed much lately, and anyway it lacks many features that Euphoria can provide. Bottomline: Euphoria could easily take over.
A side question: how difficult would it be to add to Euphoria *some* support for the C++-based Haiku API (at least for the GUI)? The success of Euphoria on Haiku would very much depend on this...
I look forward to reading your comments, especially from the developers.
7. Re: Haiku and Euphoria
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Jan 12, 2014
- 2095 views
I believe a strong case could be made for porting Euphoria to Haiku.
I strongly believe that Euphoria would have great chances of being adopted as the choice language for Haiku's beginner/hobby programmers. Of course, this is not to put down Euphoria's capabilities, which are much more extended.
Moreover, yab has not been developed much lately, and anyway it lacks many features that Euphoria can provide. Bottomline: Euphoria could easily take over.
Wow! This would certainly be interesting.
The real problem is lack of resources. Just getting a normal release out has been slow going. But an interested newbie who wants to take on the task will be able to rely on the support of the other experienced developers and the rest of the community for any help or advice necessary.
A side question: how difficult would it be to add to Euphoria *some* support for the C++ -based Haiku API (at least for the GUI)? The success of Euphoria on Haiku would very much depend on this...
A direct interface with C++ has been accomplished in the past. Very old versions of wxEuphoria did this, before Matt got sick of the pain and went with a hand written C based middle layer. For nix, it was using nm on the shared library to display the C standard mangled names and figuring out the calling convention (how to pass the this pointer around, etc). In principle this isn't too hard, but its something that you have to do over and over and over again.
Also in the past, David Cuny wrote a SWIG module for Euphoria. This is very old and is no longer compatible with modern releases of SWIG, but perhaps someone could take up the task to make a new SWIG module. This should allow for easy auto-generation of C++ headers iirc.
Alternatively, it may make sense to "port" the Haiku specific parts of Euphoria (perhaps just be_callc.c) so the C interface is built with a C++ compiler instead of a C compiler. The goal of this would be to make interfacing with C++ seemless from the open_dll()/define_c_func() perspective. Not sure what level of work is involved, though - but some code changes are likely required.
8. Re: Haiku and Euphoria
- Posted by ghaberek (admin) Jan 12, 2014
- 2121 views
I miss BeOS. 
Oh, the glory days of using an alternative alternative operating system! 
Skimming over the Haiku Book, I would say that a "shim layer" approach would be pretty easy to accomplish here (e.g. wxEuphoria). If we get Euphoria running on Haiku, I'd surely have a crack at working on this.
-Greg
P.S. If you want to write "C++" correctly, you have to escape the "++" part with a tilde character ~ like so: C~++. I've fixed all of the ones in this thread so far.
9. Re: Haiku OS and Euphoria
- Posted by GreenEuphorian Jan 13, 2014
- 2050 views
Skimming over the Haiku Book, I would say that a "shim layer" approach would be pretty easy to accomplish here (e.g. wxEuphoria).
Yes. This is also the kind of approach that many language maintainers were thinking of taking on Haiku. Like I said, on Haiku yab gained popularity precisely because it exploited the system's native API, without adding any complication. It only takes some good amount of boring work for the developers, but once it's ready the user has access to a powerful API and can use its functions with extreme ease (yab's code for accessing the API is ridiculously easy, just have a look). I am not very advanced on the technical scale, so I can't provide more detailed information on how exactly this is to be accomplished (you guys probably already know all about it), but if you want, I can give you the email contact of yab's maintainer, who can tell you more.
If we get Euphoria running on Haiku, I'd surely have a crack at working on this.
Great. I do hope to see many people getting involved in this project.
One last shot of my sales pitch: Euphoria is the ideal match for Haiku because of the affinity in their respective philosophies. In fact, their guiding principles are the same. Haiku itself is meant to be first and foremost simple and efficient, the same as Euphoria. Just like Euphoria's motto was "Just say NO to complicated programming languages", Haiku's motto might as well be "Just say NO to complicated operating systems"! I can confirm that Haiku developers are strictly sticking to this principle.
Also, let's face it: despite the fact that Euphoria has been ported to FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD... how many users do you expect on these platforms? Not many.
Haiku would definitely be THE ideal playground for Euphoria's programmers.
