41–50 of 98 posts
At this point in market concentration, any sufficiently brave or delusional soul that ventures into even the most rudimentary web browser development is a hero to me !
Did the author express that his intent was to capture browser marketshare? If not, he may not be delusional :)
At this point in market concentration, any sufficiently brave or delusional soul that ventures into even the most rudimentary web browser development is a hero to me !
as others mentioned, some people don't care about market share. the browsers I use day to day (Firefox, Chrome) are honestly pretty bloated and terrible, so I think others would agree that quality wise, users are starving for something better.
http client, UI interactions logic, domain models, utilities like tree operations, browser domain logic and all of that inside single go file? I think you'd make your life 10 times easier by splitting it better
no, did you even visit the link?
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If that's the analogy, then I think the question is certainly answered for me! "Practical isn't the point" seems pretty similar to "no, it's not generally practical."
I think there’s an interesting clue in the fact that the entire 9front has less lines of code than Go, which this browser depends on. And that includes two web browsers already shipped with the system! Yes, there are ways to force Plan 9 into something it isn’t, but fundamentally starting from the assumption that you want it replace your daily driver is not going to work out. If you’re interested in it, set it up on…
I fully acknowledge that Plan9 had a cool vision, maybe a superior one to the world we’ve got. But is it practical as an operating system for day to day use, particularly when working with other people using conventional Linux/Mac/Windows?
I have witnessed dozens of people making vague statements about how awestruck they are with plan9's vision, and I've always wondered what exactly they mean.
My take is that plan 9 is basically a "pure" rewrite of a unix/posix OS, that takes many underlying principles of unix to their logical conclusions, without the taint of the incremental evolution of the existing systems, yet nevertheless informed by the lessons learned operating real OS systems. The incompatibility is why it hasn't moved forward, though many of the good ideas that are compatible with systems like bsd/linux have since been ported over.
It is really useful exercise to consider, in hindsight, how could we have built a better unix? And a bunch of really smart people participated and came up with some great ideas.
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What's the problem with GC? Between C and Go (and maybe Scheme) there's not much choice of languages on plan 9 today. So not having to think about memory management in a browser pet project is surely the best choice when it comes to a relatively ambitious project as this. Also of note, Limbo (the language the successor was written is) is also garbage collected, so it's not like it's against the spirit of plan 9. The…
There's also Myrddin, Ocaml (port), and Haskell (nhc and Hugs), and there was some work on getting Zig working on Plan 9
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Go itself is pretty much Alef 2.0
It could have kept dynamic loading and pick types from Limbo, though.
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Qemu allows full network access. It's a very porous "sandbox"
Maybe I misunderstood Plan9, but I figured that if remote services aren't speaking 9P then everything would be a bit kludgey. Like, using Acme on local files which you push up to Github seems to be somehow against the spirit of Plan9. I suppose you could just use it like any other Unix-like OS, but what's the point? I think I'm convincing myself in this thread that it's not for me - but of course I think it's great t…
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There's also Myrddin, Ocaml (port), and Haskell (nhc and Hugs), and there was some work on getting Zig working on Plan 9
Lua works pretty nicely also.
I fully acknowledge that Plan9 had a cool vision, maybe a superior one to the world we’ve got. But is it practical as an operating system for day to day use, particularly when working with other people using conventional Linux/Mac/Windows?
It was never meant to be. Just like UNIX initially, it was a research operating system. UNIX turned out to be an accidental runaway success, and many of Plan9's greatest ideas (like synthetic filesystems, bind/union mounts, its threading library, the 9p protocol, etc) found their way to more "practical" systems.
It also did have a commercial counterpart in Inferno (mostly finding use in products like telephone switches). But nowadays both remain mostly as toys for enthusiasts. You can get work done, if you're patient enough, and have the freedom to ignore things like Zoom calls or Excel files.