After some quiet weeks on the Haiku project website, there’s good news today! Thanks to Michael Lotz and all the other devs involved in this, Haiku can now be build using GCC 4.3.3. If you are more technically inclined than I am, you will find Micheal’s blog post an interesting read. The lengthy article explains the steps that were necessary to free Haiku from the obsolete and ancient GCC 2.95.3 and all the hurdles and problems that were encountered.

Quote: This opens the door for easier porting of modern software, and more easily moves Haiku out of the “dark” GCC2 cloud that BeOS had lived under.

Why is this such great news?

Lately Haiku has become much more stable and ‘usable’, now it needs applications. Having a native GCC4 toolchain means that it will be easier to port existing software, and especially easier to port parts and packages needed by newer versions of existing applications. This will for instance benefit the work on the Mozilla ports (Firefox/Thunderbird/Seamonkey/Sunbird) & the webkit browser, but also brings a port of Gnash much closer.

‘Dogfooding’

If you believe in the project that you are developing the best way to test it would be use it yourself right? Michael uses Haiku as only operating system while doing his development work, proving that Haiku can be used daily as a development platform and that it might also be getting close to it’s initial purpose, a full replacement for BeOS release 5. The latter is shown by these screenshots, created by Giuseppe from the Italian Haiku User Group.

For the full story on Haiku-os.org you can point you mouse here, or you can stick around and discuss this news here.

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