Hi John,
thanks a lot for your ongoing enthusiasm and for joining the conversation!
Thank you Norman for continuing this enjoyable and enlightening tradition! Could you post this over on Discourse as well, since there might be different people there, and we can be chattier without disturbing the S/N ratio here?
Sure. I just created a new thread at the forum:
https://genode.discourse.group/t/roadmap-discussion-for-2026/246
Given your reflections, I'm happy that your perception is so well in line with mine.
Ambitions for 2026
I am "all in" on the concept of "Building Bridges". Even though I've had a couple of disappointing years, I really hope to work on the following in 2026, most of which fit this theme:
- VSCodium Extension
This one may be useful to others also, and it has the advantage of being pretty simple. My vision is a couple of extensions, one for the traditional build system and one for Goa. I am still gathering ideas of exactly what these would provide, but I will definitely try my hand at HID syntax highlighting. I will create a topic on Discourse to share my thoughts and get ideas from others also.
I'm looking forward to your ideas. Very cool that you are considering HID-syntax highlighting. On that account, I've recently crafted an LR-grammar for this syntax, which will hopefully contribute to your effort.
- PinePhone PDA / Games
I often miss the simplicity of PDAs, like the Palm Pilot or Newton (with stylus, not finger, but that's another question for another time). To this end, I would really like to use Goa to port (or write!) some simple apps to the PinePhone, to recreate this experience. Wish me luck! :^)
That sounds indeed well aligned with the "Bridges" theme.
Questions
Could you elaborate a little bit about the following items from your "Ambitions" section?
- "Capability-based desktop environment" - what would this entail?
Think of delegating a capability using drag and drop. Or allowing the user to easily take data from one application to another, without both applications even knowing each other. So work flows like opening a PDF downloaded via the web browser, which are currently poorly supported on Sculpt OS, would become seamless but remain under strict arbitration by the user.
- "GUI session VFS plugin" - what sort of information would you be
exposing through the VFS?
I want to expose the entire interface of the GUI session as a file-system structure, in a Plan9-like way.
Pixel buffers are files. The composition of views would described in another file. Input events can be obtained from yet another file. And vsync signaling can be obtained by reading from a pipe-like file. Multiple GUI sessions used by a single application (like a Qt app hosting each window and menu at a distinct GUI session) would form a file hierarchy. This way, even for multi-window applications, plain file system calls would suffice for interacting with Genode's native GUI stack. Think of opening a new window via mkdir.
All languages supporting the traditional notion of files could then interact with the GUI. E.g., a Genode backend for toolkits like GTK could then be written in C using plain file I/O instead of jumping though C++ hoops. But a tool kit written in a higher-level language could use file I/O just as well.
Cheers Norman