BeOS (thing)

Anyone who has any curiosity about Operating Systems at all should really give BeOS a try. It has some wonderful features that really don't exist in any other operating system, going to show that there is plenty of room for improvement in the OS world today. Unfortunately, however, you'll find that there isn't nearly enough mindshare, and consequently not enough applications, drivers, or support to switch to it full-time under most circumstances.

BeOS is based on a microkernel architecture, meaning that the kernel only has the bare-bones services that must exist in kernel space. The kernel provides a hardware abstraction layer and other basic services, but most of the functionality is provides in the various servers which run in user space. Sound, networking, and graphics services all are implemented through the use of these servers, which allows them to be stopped and restarted without rebooting! Also, if one of them crashes, it doesn't take the system down with it: you just restart whatever server crashed, and you're on your way.

Not that a reboot is so painful. BeOS boots extremely quickly, and there's never time spent waiting for an fsck, thanks to the journaling of BFS.

The next thing you notice as a user is how ridiculously responsive the GUI is. X11 and Windows simply don't compare in this department. I run it on a PII-300, 64 MB RAM, and GUI operations seem instantaneous. Resizing windows, switching between virtual desktops, clicking on buttons, it's all lightning fast, and doesn't slow down even if the computer's under a heavy load. It's nice to be reminded that GUI's don't have to feel clunky.

It looks good too. Really good. Fonts are anti-aliased, and look better than any other GUI, easily. It supports alpha blending natively, so if you drag an icon around, on top of other things, you see the background through the icon. But like the rest of the GUI, it's all very fast.

While the GUI is wonderful, with BeOS you don't have to give up your command line either! It ships with bash, gcc, grep, vi, perl and friends, making old UNIX heads feel right at home. Though it doesn't come with everything you'd expect from a UNIX commandline (awk, autoconf, and others), you can download ports of most of the GNU tools to supplement the ones that it comes with. And since BeOS includes a fairly complete layer of POSIX compatibility, porting apps from UNIX is not too difficult.

Not only do you get a commandline, but also a very powerful scripting engine for GUI applications called "hey." To demonstrate:

$ hey Tracker get Title of Window [0]

$ hey StyledEdit set Frame of Window 0 to "BRect(107,76,607,476)"

Programming for BeOS is an unparalleled delight. The API is a clean set of C++ classes that work the way you expect them to. After programming on BeOS, going back to MFC is excruciatingly painful. Just to demonstrate, the "Hello world" app in BeOS looks like this:

//
// Hello World 2000
//
// Copyright 1998, Be Incorporated
//
// Written by: Eric Shepherd
//

#include <Application.h>
#include <Window.h>
#include <View.h>


//
// HelloView class
//
// This class defines the view in which the "Hello World"
// message will be drawn.
//
class HelloView : public BView {
    public:
                        HelloView(BRect frame);
        virtual void    Draw(BRect updateRect);
};


//
// HelloView::HelloView
//
// Constructs the view we'll be drawing in.
// As you see, it doesn't do much.
//
HelloView::HelloView(BRect frame)
            : BView(frame, "HelloView", B_FOLLOW_ALL_SIDES, B_WILL_DRAW) {
}


//
// HelloView::Draw
//
// This function is called whenever our view
// needs to be redrawn.  This happens only because
// we specified B_WILL_DRAW for the flags when
// we created the view (see the constructor).
//
// The updateRect is the rectangle that needs to be
// redrawn.  We're ignoring it, but you can use it to
// speed up your refreshes for more complex programs.
//
void HelloView::Draw(BRect updateRect) {
    MovePenTo(BPoint(20,75));            // Move pen
    DrawString("Hello, world!");
}


//
// HelloWindow class
//
// This class defines the hello world window.
//
class HelloWindow : public BWindow {
    public:
                        HelloWindow(BRect frame);
        virtual bool    QuitRequested();
};


//
// HelloWindow::HelloWindow
//
// Constructs the window we'll be drawing into.
//
HelloWindow::HelloWindow(BRect frame)
            : BWindow(frame, "Hello World", B_TITLED_WINDOW,

    B_NOT_RESIZABLE|B_NOT_ZOOMABLE) {
    AddChild(new HelloView(Bounds()));
    Show();
}


//
// HelloWindow::QuitRequested
//
// When the window is closed (either by the user clicking
// the close box or by some other means),
// this function is called.  You can add code to this
// to give the user the opportunity to save their document,
// or perform other such activities.
//
// Here we just give permission to close the window.
//
bool HelloWindow::QuitRequested() {
    be_app->PostMessage(B_QUIT_REQUESTED);
    return true;
}


//
// HelloApp class
//
// This class, derived from BApplication, defines the
// Hello World application itself.
//
class HelloApp : public BApplication {
    public:
                        HelloApp();

    private:
        HelloWindow        *theWindow;
};


//
// HelloApp::HelloApp
//
// The constructor for the HelloApp class.  This
// will create our window.
//
HelloApp::HelloApp()
            : BApplication("application/x-vnd.Be-HelloWorld") {
    BRect windowRect;

    windowRect.Set(50,50,200,200);
    theWindow = new HelloWindow(windowRect);
}


//
// main
//
// The main() function's only real job in a basic BeOS
// application is to create the BApplication object,
// run it, and delete it when it terminates.
//
void main(void) {
    HelloApp *theApp;        // Pointer to our application object
    theApp = new(HelloApp);
    theApp->Run();
    delete theApp;
}

As you can see, there are no silly AFX_MESSAGE_MAPs, nor funny typedefs--this is C++ at it's best.

BeOS 5 for Intel, their latest release, is available for free, for non-commercial use. You can download it from http://free.be.com--the entire OS, including many sample applications and demos is 40 MB! All the development tools, available for free as well, are another 20 MB. The OS download is actually an EXE that installs a 500 MB file onto a Windows partition, which is nothing but an image of a BFS file system. Then, in a procedure I don't really understand, it somehow manages to boot BeOS completely natively (ie. not "under" windows). However, once the OS is installed, you can use the included Disk utility to create a real bona-fide BFS partition and install from the 500 MB fake partition to the real partition. I know this can be done: I've done it.

In my opinion, BeOS is the best desktop operating system out there. While Linux and other Unices shine on the server side, BeOS excels on the desktop in ways that UNIX can never really do if it is to maintain its flexibility.

But I fear that without major vendor support, BeOS is doomed to parallel the Amiga; superior as it is in some ways, it just doesn't have the momentum to overcome the formidable barriers to entry in the OS market.

Sources:
BeOS Bible: Scripting - http://www.beosbible.com/bos/ch_scripting6.html
http://shell.2xtreme.net/~dirk/BeOS/workshops/lesson1.html