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Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?

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Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?

#21

Post by Daniel42 »

Glenda is super cute but did you try to use Plan9? I give it a small try last year and well... GNU/Linux is mainstream, FreeBSD is a really good derivative of Unix too, OpenBSD is great when we want to have a secure OS... NetBSD would probably run on my toaster... But Plan9? It have a cute mascot.

Oh and I really like its name and the "Plan 9 from User Space" thing, especially after having seen the fabulous movie! But I think of it only as a cool thing to know, never seriously think about using it in place of a GNU/Linux or a *BSD. (same thing for Open Solaris too in fact)

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?

#23

Post by Aegean »

It's because Unix has become very popular and it is good enough for mainstream use despite its flaws. Plan 9 brings certain design improvements but they don't actually justify a need for replacement.

It's actually not that surprising since good design on its own is never a sufficient criteria for something to become mainstream.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?

#25

Post by mrj »

zephyrfalcon wrote: post #19
TallGuyShort wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of Plan 9 and Go, I have to ask the same question: why isn't Go more popular?

It has only been out since November 2009, and it wasn't considered ready for production then. Maybe it is now, but it definitely hasn't had much time to be establish a large user base.

Well... Not so much. I'm playing with it, but apparently it doesn't yet fully run on Windows. I think that'll work for my project, but that would prevent most people from using Go.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?

#26

Post by stcredzero »

dasht wrote: post #15

(In my opinion) Here's a bunch of reasons why Plan9 isn't popular, and then a reason or two why something like it likely will be before too long: The first obvious answer (also mentioned in other comments) is because "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant". See Rob Pike's paper by that name: http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf To the reasons Pike offers there, I'll add: 1. The companies that owned the software h…

My betting money is that Pike et al. will produce YANOS (yet another new OS), quite possibly mostly written in the Go programming language, really well suited for huge compute clusters.

Can't wait to see what kernel programming in Go will be like.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?

#27

Post by mhd »

zephyrfalcon wrote: post #19
TallGuyShort wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of Plan 9 and Go, I have to ask the same question: why isn't Go more popular?

It has only been out since November 2009, and it wasn't considered ready for production then. Maybe it is now, but it definitely hasn't had much time to be establish a large user base.

Go is in a "public beta" status, i.e. what you see right now is its development, not its refinement. It basically hasn't reached a 1.0 release version yet. Participants of the mailing list are very early adopters who write some libraries for it. It's still likely enough that important parts of the language spec will change in non-compatible ways, and especially the standard library still isn't too stable (e.g. the http module is a bit orphaned right now).

But the progress is quite impressive, and it might hit a niche for lots of people (those Zed Shaw tends to call "longbeards"). Unix systems programming is still dominated by C, as there aren't that many valid alternatives. Java is systems programming for the Java system, C++ is C++. Ocaml is probably one step too far for bit pushers. And then there's the pedigree of the developers.

I think within a year the language should have matured enough. If someone manages to come up with a "killer application" for it (c.f. RoR/Ruby or node.js/server-side Javascript), it might take off.

It might also end up like Modula-3.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?

#28

Post by kaib »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #10
jbarham wrote: post #5

IMO Plan 9 didn't gain critical mass because Unix is still "good enough". It's also very difficult to keep current with hardware drivers for a niche OS. However, there are some things that came from Plan 9 that are very much mainstream, the most notable being UTF-8 which was invented by Ken Thompson and first implemented on Plan 9. Linux's clone(2) system call is obviously inspired by Plan 9's rfork. And one could ar…

Speaking of Plan 9 and Go, I have to ask the same question: why isn't Go more popular?

I think this is a hard question to answer without a solid definition of popular.

That said, at our startup we use Go for all server side work and I wrote Go production code while still working for Google. In my little world it's very popular, the only other language we use is Javascript.

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?

#29

Post by drivingmenuts »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #10
jbarham wrote: post #5

IMO Plan 9 didn't gain critical mass because Unix is still "good enough". It's also very difficult to keep current with hardware drivers for a niche OS. However, there are some things that came from Plan 9 that are very much mainstream, the most notable being UTF-8 which was invented by Ken Thompson and first implemented on Plan 9. Linux's clone(2) system call is obviously inspired by Plan 9's rfork. And one could ar…

Speaking of Plan 9 and Go, I have to ask the same question: why isn't Go more popular?

Because it's promoted by a company with institutional ADD?

/snark

Re: Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?

#30

Post by jbarham »

alnayyir wrote: post #16
TallGuyShort wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of Plan 9 and Go, I have to ask the same question: why isn't Go more popular?

Not substantially performant for use in systems programming. Not substantially powerful or enough libraries for use in web dev (yet, this could change). Global GC (inappropriate for the niche it's ostensibly targeting). Overly opinionated about concurrency. (C++ and Java are the gold-standard for library-centric concurrency methodologies) Go sits in an uncanny valley.

> C++ and Java are the gold-standard for library-centric concurrency methodologies

The last time I checked concurrency isn't possible with standard C++. And multi-threaded programming in Java has been called many things, but "gold-standard" isn't one of them.

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