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Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?

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

#51

Post by mycroftiv »

I use Plan 9 extensively and intensively, and I believe there are multiple reasons why it is comparatively little-known and little-used. I think the most important reason is the historical conflict over software patents between Rob Pike and Richard Stallman, and the cultural rift that it represented. Plan 9 is now under a pretty decent permissive license, but it still doesn't really function in the manner of a conventional open source operating system project. By the time Plan 9 was under a decent license, the mindshare of FOSS developers and the corporate ecosystem were already completely committed to other projects.

Plan 9 is still relevant and interesting and useful for some tasks. It may still be ahead of its time. Plan 9 has had data deduplication for about a decade, years before network data dedupe storage appliances became an important product. The Linux kernel is still struggling to figure out a decent way to implement union directories in filesystems, but unions have been working elegantly in Plan 9 since its early days.

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

#52

Post by SecurityMatters »

Howdy, I installed Plan 9 several years ago(close to 10, if I remember correctly). I thought it was interesting, but it had a few problems. 1. It was too hard to install. I figured it out, but it was difficult enough that I thought I would not be able to recommend it to many others, unless they were fairly advanced. 2. The supported hardware list was too small. Mostly, this was a problem with supported nics. On a system like Plan9, a system without a good NIC is pretty useless. 3. The community of users was too small. I did not find any other local users. I found a small community of online users, but they only seemed interested in using Plan9 to break into systems and that did not interest me. I should probably try it again, since many of these things could have improved. I have also used Inferno a bit on a prototype ATT phone and I would like to program that a bit. Linux ended up having most of what I wanted Plan9 for and that is probably why I have not tried it for so long.

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

#53

Post by tonfa »

kaib wrote: post #28
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?

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.

Interesting, how was Go used at Google? How do they deal with incompatible changes?

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

#54

Post by hapless »

leif wrote: post #12

Same reason the Hurd never materialized. Linux was good enough that nobody cared to put in the massive effort required to make the slightly better solution industry-strength. It's something like the death by a thousand cuts, only in this case, the thousand cuts are unsupported hardware and silly programs that don't have ports or package maintainers, but that people still want anyway. BSD gets away with being the unpo…

Hurd was never fully functional. It never worked well enough to have an opportunity to be rejected for being weird.

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

#55

Post by xiongchiamiov »

mhd wrote: post #27
zephyrfalcon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ht…

What about D?

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

#56

Post by jedbrown »

IdeaHamster wrote: post #34
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…

I'd put more money on enough people finally paying enough attention to DragonFlyBSD for it to really gain traction. Check out the blurb on their main page ( http://www.dragonflybsd.org/ ): The DragonFly project's ultimate goal is to provide native clustering support in the kernel. This involves the creation of a sophisticated cache management framework for filesystem namespaces, file spaces, and VM spaces, which allo…

with cache coherency fully guaranteed in all respects

It's not at all clear that this is desirable. I'd much rather have thin (one or two socket) systems with a reliable network and write for distributed memory. Even four-socket systems have quite unpredictable performance characteristics.

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

#57

Post by CyberFonic »

I've worked with Plan9 and Inferno. I think they both failed for two reasons:

1. lack of device drivers for commonly found hardware at the time.

2. Ugly looking graphics and desktops and difficult (relative to what was widely used at the time) to use as well.

IBM's use of Plan9 with BlueGene uses the server side benefits so they need only a small number of custom device drivers and the GUI is not used at all.

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

#58

Post by jbarham »

joey_bananas wrote: post #46
gchpaco wrote: post #43

My theory is this: - too weird - Plan 9 is very difficult to get used to as a user experience. Novel, fascinating, powerful, yes! But also minimal, impenetrable, and very very different from the UI you're used to as a Unix hacker. - nonexistent marketing - too hard to get into initially; I wish they had gone to a public source repository model earlier, although in all fairness the project predates a lot of this. But,…

> - UTF8 came from Plan 9 Not really, Ken Thompson certainly contributed to it, but they didn't invent it.

No, UTF-8 was invented by Ken Thompson. Source, by Rob Pike: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/utf-8-history.txt

Key quote: "Looking around at some UTF-8 background, I see the same incorrect story being repeated over and over. The incorrect version is: 1. IBM designed UTF-8. 2. Plan 9 implemented it. That's not true. UTF-8 was designed [by Ken Thompson], in front of my eyes, on a placemat in a New Jersey diner one night in September or so 1992."

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

#59

Post by Avshalom »

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 still not really on Windows. Which means all the programmers stuck in Windows shops out there aren't doing anything with it, the game writing community isn't doing anything, and even people who write desktop apps are still looking at it a bit funny. Critical mass is slow to build as a result.
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