Haiku, yet another operating system...

Haiku, as ZETA does, claims to be one of the successor of BeOS.

You can find a video presentation of Haiku at Google Tech (on 02/13/07) here

At the beginning of the presentation there is an interview of Jean-Louis Gassée, the former CEO of (now dead) BeOS. The latter says that rewriting huge software like an operating system is good because we must push technology into all sorts of directions. He also says that creating an ecosystem with combinations of alive components can lead to "unexpected results". He then compares it with the story of Google that had to convince people for the need of new kind of search engines, and then finally suceeded in.

Mickael Phipps, the leader of the Haiku Project then presents the feature of the OS:

- Unlike Linux that is generalistic (runs on desktops, appliances, embedded systems), Haiku is dedicated for desktops.

Haiku main focuses have been Responsiveness + Simplicity

Here are some various intersting features of the OS (The good):

• Comes with a built-in rich API, no need to add external libraries for running cool apps).

• Haiku handles multi-core and is natively multi-threaded (as they say multi-core is the future of computing).

• There is C++ in the kernel : altough such practices would be traditionnaly "forbidden". Especially, such design falicitated usage of a poweful Cplusplus B+Tree implementation in the filesystem. (For LSE/OS we used BSD style macros for implementing B+Tree in C language).

The bad:

• OS is 10 times slower than Linux

• TCP doesn't work very well

• Firefox crashed during presentation (Murphy's Law).

• Gcc is not well supported.

• There is not so much relationship to ZETA (altough the latter promised some drivers)

Official website of Haiku OS