[webkit-dev] Has anybody ported WebKit to a platform other than Windows or Unix?

[Ryan Leavengood]

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 4:27 AM, Paul Pedriana <ppedriana at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm wondering if anybody has successfully ported WebKit to a platform
> other than Windows or Unix.

I ported it to Haiku (http://www.haiku-os.org), which is essentially a
clone of BeOS. There is still some work to do, but the basics of it
are there.

I did this work by myself in a few months while having a full-time job
(not at all related) and in general living my life. On the other hand
a team of people has been working on Firefox for BeOS for years and it
still has problems. I've heard many stories about how the Mozilla code
is very complicated because of the XPCOM and various other choices
they have made over the years.

I think WebKit is a much cleaner code-base to port to new platforms.
It is also much faster, which is one big reason I chose it as the
engine for a Haiku web browser. BeOS is very fast, Haiku will be too,
and we want our applications fast too.

There is no doubt that seeing all the platform files needed for WebKit
can be daunting, but a browser is complicated and needs quite a bit of
functionality from the platform to do its job, so it makes sense. I
think you would be even more daunted to see what is needed to get
Mozilla going.

Regards,
Ryan