This was how I relearned to program in C++ and ported a few apps to the OS. It was a great experience and the OS has come on leaps and bounds. If anything for many it could be a daily driver nowadays.

The tutorial is from 2010. At the time people were much more enthusiastic about Haiku and other alternative operating systems.

Now we only have Windows and Unix like.

I still wonder what would have happened had Jean-Louis Gassée been less greedy and Apple acquired BeOs instead of Next.

I discovered BeOs in 2000 and it seemed to me much more interesting at that moment than either Windows or Linux. Not only it looked and felt better but it introduced other ideas and concepts.

I had hopes it's adoption will increase but it soon withered and died.

I still wonder why we can't do better than Unix and Windows. Unix is 50 years old and Windows is old, too. There should be better concepts out there waiting to be discovered and implemented.

At some point there were many companies, universities, groups and individuals involved in researching and implementing operating systems.

At that point I was following OsNews website daily and each day there were news about some new and exciting developments.

Not anymore.

I miss the days when I read about BeOS, Syllable, AROS, MorphOS, AtheOS, SkyOS, Plan 9, Inferno, Singularity. And there were a ton of interesting kernels, too.

Because Haiku has taken such an extraordinarily long time, as with a city centre that was constructed over multiple centuries we can see the clear lines of new work with new techniques and materials on top of old work done in a way that was usual at the time.

Haiku has a lot of C++ 98 code or even pre-standard C++, not least all the stuff re-used with permission from BeOS. As was usual for projects at that time many fundamental building blocks are provided rather than using a language standard. For example there's BString and BList.

Haiku also has seams of BSD code where there'd be a project to do Whatever (WiFi, TLS, drivers, etc.) "properly" in a way unique to Haiku but as a stop gap here's some BSD code until we finish our own proper solution, which of course never happens.

This a a great tutorial! Very easy to read and understand. If someone would like to dive into C programming I would suggest this.

Somewhat tangential: this reminded me of Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" [1] which speaks highly of BeOS.

I liked the bug report "R4: BeOS missing megalomaniacal figurehead to harness and focus developer rage" (:

[1] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt