And things such as ruby don't work on it. Well, what shall I say? The "best" ideas get beaten when in practically already works very well - aka Linux. People need to compare to Linux and if there are failure points, they need to fix it. Haiku keeps on failing at core considerations. If you look at guides, they recommend to "run in qemu". Well, that is a fever dream. They need to focus on real hardware. And they need to support programming languages just as Linux does. And modern hardware too. Would be great if Haiku could shape up but the development is way too slow. I've been looking at it for many years - they are simply unable to leave the dream era. ReactOS is even worse in this regard. At some point those projects gave up on the real world. I think qemu, while great, kind of made this problem worse, since people no longer focus on real hardware; the mantra is "if it works in a virtual EM, it is perfect". Until one notices that it doesn't work quite as well on real hardware. Case in point how ruby does not work on Haiku. Ruby works well on BSD (for the most part), linux (no surprise) and also windows (a bit annoying, but it does work there too and surprisingly well, for about 99% of the use cases, though it is annoyingly slower in startup time compared to linux).
> I've been looking at it for many years - they are simply unable to leave the dream era.
Sit down and do the work needed to get Ruby running properly on Haiku instead of sitting here complaining and basically admitting that you're just being a noisy spectator... On HackerNews, no less.
Huh, PHP works on Haiku, and there aren't even that many #ifdefs for it in the source. If a language can be ported to Windows, Haiku should be a no-brainer. Seems more a matter of having someone interested in maintaining the port, and I think it ultimately just points to the size of Haiku's userbase being a rounding error.
> And things such as ruby don't work on it.
What doesn't work about it? We have Ruby in the software repositories, and Ruby is required to build WebKit (and we build WebKit on Haiku), so clearly it works for that much at least. I don't see any open tickets at HaikuPorts about bugs in the port, either.
Getting Rebol running on Haiku was fairly easy task, so I guess it shouldn't be that hard for Ruby too, if someone's willing to do the work.
What does not work? You can install Ruby version 3.2.9 (2025-07-24) with a point-and-click package manager HaikuDepot and it works perfectly fine.
People aren't really running servers on Haiku, which is basically the only relevance to use Ruby in 2026, Rails powered web applications.
Then again, there is a golden opportunity to become a Ruby contributor, road to fame on Ruby contribution list.
Maybe 5% of what I use Ruby for is on the server. I'd suggest those of us who use Ruby client side are likely to outnumber Haiku users by magnitude or two.
Homebrew would like a word.
Homebrew wouldn't support Haiku anyway.
Mostly relevant for folks on macOS, and I skip on it when using Mac anyway rather using UNIX and SDK tools in the box, so kind of debatable.
Debatable because you don't use it?