Interview with Haiku developer Paweł Dziepak

https://www.haiku-os.org/news/2014-05-10_extensive_interview_haiku_developer_pawe%C5%82_dziepak

by izietto • 12 years ago

76 47 12 years ago

girvo3• 12 years ago

Ah Haiku, my true OS love. How I miss you (and wish I could use you for production work). One of these days I'll get back into your warm, nostalgic embrace once more.

Are there many here that were BeOS lovers? I'm too young for that, unfortunately, but found Haiku when it was alpha 3, and have fond memories of playing with it for months. Having a true desktop operating system with a great architecture and quite an amazing SDK... now I use OS X and elementary OS, but I still fire up a VM now and then.

In the interview, he talks about attributes, which are basically meta-data at the file-system level. Such an amazing but simple idea, that works wonders. Having a mail client that literally works with files on the file-system is quite a different experience!

weland• 12 years ago

Are there many here that were BeOS lovers?

I'm one. I used BeOS 5 on my home computer for a while, a long time ago. Not for production work, mind you, but for everyday stuff and programming of my own, nonetheless.

secstate• 12 years ago

I loved BeOS after a co-worker at one of my first jobs waxed poetic about it. Bought the BeOS Bible and read all about it. Really wish it had been more ready for primetime. As it was, you pretty much needed the BONE extensions to make it useful on the internet. And NetPositive was a minor upgrade over Mosaic and Firefox didn't run very well, at least in my experience.

Still, you can't argue with 5 second boots. Took Apple what, 15 years to catch up with that?

renox• 12 years ago

Are there many here that were BeOS lovers?

Yes, BeOS was fantastic: it booted in 14seconds on my computer and was immediately very responsive where Linux and Windows booted in >1m20s plus they weren't very responsive (Windows was slow as a snail after the boot until it really finished booting)..

Unfortunately even though BeOS was much, much more pleasant to use than Linux or Windows (thanks to its responsiveness), the lack of applications for BeOS meant that I rarely used it in fact..

And now SSDs mean that even normal OSs feel quite responsive, so I'm not waiting Haiku anymore..

IMHO its developers made a fatal mistake when they didn't use Linux for their kernel, it meant that it would take much more time to have an usable OS and they missed their 'window of opportunity'.. Yes, I know about Blue.Eyed.OS but it was a failed project from the start due to their strange indecision about licensing..

donatj• 12 years ago

Man, I have the song that came with R5 "5038" (BeOS backwards) in my iTunes and listen to it much more than I probably should, longing for the good old days. I fell in love on an old AMD1000 tower and it's never gone away. I spend nights up pondering what the world would be like today if Apple had bought Be rather than NeXT per thr original plan. Ah the nostalgia.

Update: Here is the song for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlOi-L-N0X4

rayiner2• 12 years ago

Are there many here that were BeOS lovers?

I used it on the desktop for about six months to a year (1999? 2000?). R4.5. Switched away when they sold to Palm.

I still have a copy of Giampalo's "Practical Filesystem Design" somewhere in the house. It looks like he's published it online: http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf.

I remember at the time being upset that Apple had gone with NeXT instead of BeOS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#History), but in retrospect it was obviously the right call, even from a technical point of view. It's really crazy that OS X 10.0 was such a pig on the systems of the time, but now fits in a phone...

PS: Does anyone know if Be's developer notes/articles are archived anywhere? I remember there being some really great articles from the OS developers about stuff like how the app_server worked, etc.

EDIT: Ah yes, the Be Newsletters: http://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/index.html. These are fricking great. I strongly recommend reading them for anyone interested in OS internals.

gecko5• 12 years ago

I'm not quite sure what you're aiming for, but the Be Book is available online (https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/), and includes all the documentation for the API. I don't know that any of the internals stuff is online, though.

EDIT: Haiku also has the Be newsletters (https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/index.html) and "Programming the Be Operating System" (https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/programming_the_be_oper...), which actually does encompass everything I think you were looking for.

protomyth4• 12 years ago

"It's really crazy that OS X 10.0 was such a pig on the systems of the time"

I was so ticked because OpenStep and NeXTSTEP were so responsive and I couldn't figure out what the people at Apple had done to it. Plus, changing how the menu[1] worked and moving the vertical scrollbar were and are grave sins as far as I'm concerned.

1) The UI rule that is used to justify using the Mac menu bar doesn't make any sense for touch, big monitors, or multi-monitors.

protomyth4• 12 years ago

Are there many here that were BeOS lovers?

I had two machines one my desk at one point, a NeXTSTEP box[1] and a box running BeOS. I loved them both. I spent a bit more time on NeXTSTEP because I took to Objective-C a bit better than C++. I didn't really like Mac OS at that point, but its "children" were a lot of fun.

1) we had a HP LaserJet 4 with the PS expansion and my boss ran the printer out of paper over the weekend. The NeXTSTEP box was on and announced in a very irritated female voice with a British accent "The Printer is out of Paper". This scared my boss and she had words on Monday.

gillianseed3• 12 years ago

Are there many here that were BeOS lovers?

Yep, I recently stumbled across my Beos 3.1 copy with complete packaging, separate intel and powerpc discs, BeOS sticker and a 'We Be Geeks' plastic pocket thingy which gave me a huge burst of nostalgia.

I'm also (perhaps unsurprisingly) a fan of Haiku, while I run a Linux distro 24/7 these days and only play around Haiku in a VM, I would love to some day be able to use it for my desktop needs.

It's an uphill battle though, few developers and few porters means there's a shortage of progress and software available which most potential users would consider a 'bare minimum' these days.

Perhaps the most obvious is the lack of a modern browser, WebPositive is an attempt to rectify this but it's a huge undertaking with at the moment only one guy working on it which means progress is slow, despite him putting in a ton of work.

My hope is that a R1 release complete with package management and WebPositive working sufficiently well for day to day web use, will serve as something of a tipping point where people can start to see it's potential as a day to day OS and start using it while also developing/porting further software they feel it is lacking.

momerath• 12 years ago

I owned a BeBox and used it as my desktop for several years, til it stopped posting. The use of its relational-database-like filesystem, for email and organizing my music, was such a joy.

I once wrote a _MacOS_ shareware review site for a friend, as a single, small perl script that looked through a tree in the filesystem of a BeOS box (on mac-clone hardware), and spit out html. The descriptions and reviews were just metadata columns I added to the relevant mime-types.

pjmlp2• 12 years ago

Are there many here that were BeOS lovers?

Yes! I loved to play around with it.

A multimedia OS, dumping C for C++ with a feel that I didn't had since my Amiga days, when I used to spend time with friends doing demoscene stuff and playing around with ProTracker.

baldfat4• 12 years ago

Haiku OS developer is 22!!!! I loved BeOS and had such high hopes for it. Once again superior technology losses to Apple and Microsoft.

Amazing Technology that loss (By pain factor.

1) Amiga (1985- ?) (It was light year ahead of everyone especially Apple (Toaster anyone) Drama from Commodore CEO was the cause of death.

2) BeOS (1992-2001) BeOS was to be OSX but Apple refused to pay more then $125 mill and BeOS wanted $200 mill.

3) Dvorak keyboard (1936) lost to QWERTY which was designed so poorly to slow down people's typing so that mechanical typewriters wouldn't jam. Dvorak keyboard was designed for typing speed.

jacquesm• 12 years ago

Re. 1: At the same time we had the Acorn 'Unicorn'. Amiga was a nice machine for its day but there were other good machines besides. The biggest factor that did the Amiga in is imo 'CDTV'.

Re. 2: looks like superior tech lost to greed.

Re. 3: I never felt that my typing speed was the limiting factor in my productivity.

girvo3• 12 years ago

Greed? *shrugs, this was in the 90's. I don't think that's greed, just a difference on what two parties believed it was worth.

ebiester2• 12 years ago

1. While the Amiga was ahead of Apple in some ways, there was a reason people bought the Macintosh. It was a better user experience for most people.

2. NeXT would have been considered the "Fantastic technology that was never appreciated" if everyone would have went with BeOS. And do you really think that the Be experience would have been the one that survived to OSX?

3. QWERTY being designed to slow people down is a myth long since debunked. Further, as i understand it, Colemak is the way to go today. Why is everyone sticking with Dvorak? :)

collyw• 12 years ago

Does querty not make a bit of sense again, with the advent of touchscreens? If it was designed to minimize key jams, then I would assume that it leads to less ambiguity in what words are being typed.

(And the Amiga was a far superior experience to a Mac. It had colour for starters. )

pjmlp2• 12 years ago

While the Amiga was ahead of Apple in some ways, there was a reason people bought the Macintosh. It was a better user experience for most people.

Where, USA?

Because in Europe it was Atari ST and Amiga everywhere.

The first time I could put my eyes on a physical Mac I was already at the university. We had just one little tiny room with 10 LCs and the secretaries at CS department had 3 more.

On the other hand, we had lots of PCs, UNIX Terminals, Amiga and Ataris to choose from.

baldfat4• 12 years ago

2. Yes BeOS was fantastic and had multi-threading built in. Used NeXT and hated it compared to AmigaOS (I was very comfortable with it).

3. QWERTY is still considered to be developed to reduce key jams by most historians.

I read the Japanese and Smithsonian Papers and well not Debunked just another a different theory that doesn't disprove the idea of mechanical issues with the typewriter.

Thanks on the Colemak mention. I hadn't run into that layout till now.

gillianseed3• 12 years ago

It was light year ahead of everyone especially Apple (Toaster anyone) Drama from Commodore CEO was the cause of death.

I have to disagree here, the cause of death for Amiga was in my opinion the PC with which Amiga could not compete performance-wise due to sticking with the Motorola 680x0 cpu's.

The Amiga's bitplane based graphics didn't help either as it was slow even with the dedicated blitter and when the PC got VGA mode x 'one byte per pixel' 256 color planar modes the jig was up in terms of the Amiga being able to keep up in terms of game graphics.

baldfat4• 12 years ago

BUT that was 6+ years AFTER Amiga launched!

frik4• 12 years ago

BeOS with its database-like BFS filesystem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeFS ) were forerunners for its time. The BFS developer Dominic Giampaolo was later responsible for Apple's Spotlight desktop search in OSX 10.4 and iOS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(software)

Similar to Bill Gates vision of Information at Your Fingertips with the later Microsoft's Cairo project and even later WinFS (both vamporware) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_operating_system, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

Microsoft's NTFS and especially its newer ReFS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS ) are conceptually similar to BFS. The missing piece is a layer above the kernel driver that would have been WinFS - a shell integration and search API.

gecko5• 12 years ago

I might grant that NTFS is conceptually similar to BFS (though its alternate data streams lack types, IIRC; been awhile since I dove into that). I am optimistic that the new commandlets introduced in PowerShell 3, along with better tooling, might mean that Windows 9 starts using them more heavily, much like OS X ~10.7 started to.

But I don't agree ReFS is in the same boat. ReFS, at least as it exists today, has more in common with Plan 9's Fossil/Venti than anything else. Most notably, it explicitly doesn't support alternate streams, which is the exact piece of NTFS that is most like BFS, nor does it support extended attributes (the vestigial HPFS-era predecessor to alternate data streams). Given that it also lacks things like hard links, file system transactions (N.B., this is database-like transactions for a collection of file system operations, not traditional file system journaling), and a bunch of other things that I associate with BFS-like everything-is-a-database file systems, I don't think that comparison is apt.

frik4• 12 years ago

  Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 add additional
  features when using ReFS, including alternate data 
  streams [...]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS (bottom) and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831724.aspx

ReFS features are still evolving and like NTFS is designed to be extendable (as has happened with NTFS).

It is of course NTFS that was involved in all the history of WinNT, Cairo and WinFS and still is the major FS. (I just mentioned ReFS for completeness)

Neither NTFS ADS nor Apple'S Resource fork and HFS+ ADS are something new: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Alternate_data_streams_.28..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(file_system)#Apple and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork

And neither the Explorer shell nor OSX Finder expose it as GUI - what a shame.

dotNet API's lags behind WinAPI, so dotNet/PowerShell just catches up a bit - nothing special.

Windows 9 will be interesting indeed. But I have my doubts... given that Win Vista had the advanced search dialog in Explorer shell. The newer Win 7 had no such dialog and generally the whole metadata idea was buried away in the slightly changed UI (removed list-group bar, changed metadata bar, folder doesn't remember state, custom added columns not saved, etc.) Even the great "Photo gallery" application has a optional download as part of their LIVE apps and Media player hides the playlist with its star-rating by default, etc. I don't comment Win 8.x.

ginko• 12 years ago

I remember that one of BeOS's primary shortcomings compared to current mainstream systems is that it's essentially single-user.

Has this been tackled in Haiku?

girvo3• 12 years ago

No, still single user. Though as a straight desktop system that's never really worried me personally... I do remember someone saying they had begun tackling it, but I could be making that up.

gecko5• 12 years ago

I don't think anyone's really begun tackling it. There's widespread agreement that Haiku should eventually support it, but I don't know that anyone's done any effort to really move in that direction (with one pseudo-exception: Haiku does a better job than BeOS properly arranging the file system into user-specific v. machine-specific folders, which will help when they get there).

jahitr• 12 years ago

BeOS was great.

All the hard work put on the icons and the GUI. It was truly remarkable.

If i'm not mistaken, I compiled my first C program on that OS.

Reading the SDK documentation was also a great source of ideas for a newbie in C++. I remember that the idea of flattenable objects blow my mind :D

To this day I still wonder why it hasn't gained more adoption.

Mad respect at all those folks working on Haiku!

batmansbelt• 12 years ago

Just tried out the virtual machine. Seems pretty slick! It's a very fast OS, just like I remember BeOS being back in 1998. Still suffers the same problem that I have no real reason to use it.

Interview with Haiku developer Paweł Dziepak

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