BeOS-Inspired Haiku OS Had A Successful GSoC 2017: Swift, Btrfs, Preferences GUI

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 30 August 2017 at 05:47 AM EDT. 6 Comments
OPERATING SYSTEMS
With Google Summer of Code 2017 now in the books, the final reports on the various projects carried out within the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system are now available.

We previously already covered the work done on Btrfs write support in Haiku via GSoC 2017, but that wasn't their only project done by student developers the past few months.

There was also a push around TCP optimization and tuning. The TCP optimizations were in the realm of improving the congestion control and various other networking improvements were made to its kernel code. The kernel patches are still being reviewed.

Also taking place during GSoC 2017 was refactoring their preferences GUI. A rework was done of the operating system's control panel interface, improving the search, and much more:


Also related on the GUI side was working on a calendar application. Haiku's Calendar App now properly deals with events, supports fetching events from the Google Calendar, allows a SQLite storage backend for events, and more.

Lastly was work done on porting Swift to Haiku, yes, the Apple-developed programming language built atop LLVM. Swift 3.1 and Swift 4 can be built on Haiku and simple Swift programs should be executing. But not all Swift code-bases are running and there isn't yet package manager support and other missing features.

Great to see these improvements made by these student developers to Haiku OS over the summer of 2017!
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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