Haiku gets new Go port

There’s a new Haiku monthly activity report, and this one’s a true doozy. Let’s start with the biggest news.

The most notable development in November was the introduction of a port of the Go programming language, version 1.18. This is still a few years old (from 2022; the current is Go 1.25), but it’s far newer than the previous Go port to Haiku (1.4 from 2014); and unlike the previous port which was never in the package repositories, this one is now already available there (for x86_64 at least) and can be installed via pkgman.
↫ Haiku activity report

As the project notes, they’re still a few versions behind, but at least it’s a lot more modern of an implementation than they had before. Now that it’s in the repositories for Haiku, it might also attract more people to work on the port, potentially bringing even newer versions to the BeOS-inspired operating system. Welcome as it may be, this new Go port isn’t the only big ticket item this month.

Haiku can now gracefully recover from an app_server crash, something it used to be able to do a long time ago, but which was broken for a long time. The app_server is Haiku’s display server and window manager, so the ability to restart it at runtime after a crash, and have it reconnect with still-running applications, is incredibly welcome. As far as I can tell, all modern operating systems can do this by now, so it’s great to have this functionality restored in Haiku.

Of course, aside from these two big improvements, there’s the usual load of fixes and changes in applications, drivers, and other components of the operating system.