Re:Haiku OS ported and running on RISC-V
by waddlesplash on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @10:01AM
(#27130407)
There is no technical reason one could not port Chromium or Firefox at this point; it's simply that nobody has put the time in to do it (as you can imagine, porting a web browser is not an easy task.)
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There's 600+ patches needed to build chrome on BSD, and upstream is constantly churning, which means they need maintenance.
Upstream refuses to import anything related to BSD support, so they need to be maintained out of tree.
And this is for a much more popular set of projects.
"Not an easy task" is a bit of an understatement.
The demise of TenFourFox is relevant: http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfox... .
I've built Firefox on NetBSD. I wonder how many patches are required for it.
Presumably the use of rust is a dependency that needs fulfilled for building FF. Looks like there has been some work on getting rust to play with Haiku at both the Rust and Haiku ends:
https://docs.rs/haiku/0.2.0/haiku/
https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/nielx/2020-09-06_rust_on_haiku...
Some of those are for optional features like WebRTC, they are not all needed for a functional browser.
Re:Haiku OS ported and running on RISC-V
by codetrotter on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @06:15PM
(#27135810)
This thread is about fully featured browsers though. I think without WebRTC you can not call the browser fully featured.
Firefox 52 is the last version that can be built without Rust, it is kept in pkgsrc for that reason.
Re:Haiku OS ported and running on RISC-V
by yjftsjthsd-h on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @11:46AM
(#27131660)
> as you can imagine, porting a web browser is not an easy task
I would imagine, but now I'm trying to figure out why; do they really use that much API surface? Network access should be simple enough, they need audio, keyboard input, and a canvas/surface to render to, but what else?
Re:Haiku OS ported and running on RISC-V
by phendrenad2 on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @05:16PM
(#27135255)
I think the problem is most modern browsers are a pile of open-source libraries at the bottom, any of which may use architecture-specific and/or compiler-specific native code. Also different systems have slightly different toolchains, for instance, compiling BSD on Linux can't be done because Linux GCC can't handle the divergent BSD GCC makefiles. D'oh! Wonder how that happened, surely they'll fix it soon...