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A Week with Plan 9

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Re: A Week with Plan 9

#11

Post by ChrisSD »

runjake wrote: post #3

> This is a fringe Operating System No, TempleOS was a fringe operating system. Plan 9 was a legitimate research operating system developed by computer scientists who had a key role in the development of UNIX and other highly-regarded pieces of software. Plan 9-based technologies are a part of most, if not all, operating systems today (even Windows!). But, a fun article, and I'm always happy to see Plan 9 crop up fro…

> It's at risk of being forgotten

Not by HN at least. It comes up fairly regularly in one context or another. Though usually when someone is bemoaning some aspect of POSIX or Linux.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#12

Post by floren »

jeromenerf wrote: post #10
jsolson wrote: post #2

It's not entirely abandoned. A few years ago Brad Fitzpatrick dropped by my desk because the latest Google Compute Engine virtualization stack rollout had broken Plan 9 on GCE. This was interfering with cutting a new Go release (the official releases ran on VMs running Plan 9). I don't remember the specific breakage, but that was the day we added Plan 9 to the stable of operating systems we run in our CI regression s…

Some people in the go team were indeed part of the plan9 team, Rob Pike and Russ Cox to mention a few. Iirc Russ Cox ported Plan9 userspace to Linux when he moved to google, somehow out of frustration. Thanks for that, using acme on Unix is like a hot summer late afternoon fresh beer. Or whatever fresh beverage of your fancy.

Acme on Unix is almost as good as Acme on Plan 9, but I can't stress enough how great it is on a real Plan 9 system inside rio.

p9p acme does introduce multi-line tag displays, though, which is hugely convenient when I want to keep track of lots of line numbers or hold a bunch of Edit commands.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#13

Post by MisterTea »

runjake wrote: post #3

> This is a fringe Operating System No, TempleOS was a fringe operating system. Plan 9 was a legitimate research operating system developed by computer scientists who had a key role in the development of UNIX and other highly-regarded pieces of software. Plan 9-based technologies are a part of most, if not all, operating systems today (even Windows!). But, a fun article, and I'm always happy to see Plan 9 crop up fro…

Plenty of people still interested but the community is small. It's far from dead or forgotten. 9front is updated on a near daily basis.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#14

Post by nix23 »

floren wrote: post #9
nix23 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes, they moved into Inferno, and implemented Alef ideas in Limbo. No to 9front, 9legacy AND Inferno.

Pike, Thompson, Presotto, Collyer, McKie, none of these people contribute to either 9front or 9legacy, beyond providing the original Plan 9 code base which underlies all the forks.

And nor do they to inferno:

https://bitbucket.org/inferno-os/inferno-os/commits/?page=3

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#15

Post by MisterTea »

pjmlp wrote: post #5

> Plan 9 is as filled with unpolished brilliance as Mozart’s Requiem. It’s the Sagrada Familia of Operating Systems. It’s creators left long ago but people keep building on the scaffolds. If nothing else, it’s a collection of fantastic ideas never intended for mass consumption. This is The Holy Mountain of Operating Systems. Yes, they moved into Inferno, and implemented Alef ideas in Limbo. http://www.vitanuova.com/i…

AFIK Inferno was a corporate reaction to Java and intended to be an actual competing product. Plan 9 development was halted for nearly a whole year as the team focused on building Inferno.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#17

Post by nix23 »

spijdar wrote: post #8
nix23 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes, they moved into Inferno, and implemented Alef ideas in Limbo. No to 9front, 9legacy AND Inferno.

The creators of plan9 are not involved in 9front, and I don't think they were ever involved with 9legacy, unless I've missed something. I believe 9front's (rather colorful) user manual pointedly remarks that the original authors of plan9 have long since abandoned the project.

>The creators of plan9 are not involved in 9front

Nor are they in Inferno anymore, but one big name Forsyth in 2017

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#18

Post by MisterTea »

jsolson wrote: post #2

It's not entirely abandoned. A few years ago Brad Fitzpatrick dropped by my desk because the latest Google Compute Engine virtualization stack rollout had broken Plan 9 on GCE. This was interfering with cutting a new Go release (the official releases ran on VMs running Plan 9). I don't remember the specific breakage, but that was the day we added Plan 9 to the stable of operating systems we run in our CI regression s…

> I don't know if the Go releases are still done on Plan 9, but it seems likely that's still an active use of the OS.

Go still builds. It's just difficult to build it out of the box on 9 because of bootstrap issues. Though not sure if the latest 9 build bug was squashed.

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#19

Post by _b8r0 »

Technically wrote: post #6
runjake wrote: post #3

> This is a fringe Operating System No, TempleOS was a fringe operating system. Plan 9 was a legitimate research operating system developed by computer scientists who had a key role in the development of UNIX and other highly-regarded pieces of software. Plan 9-based technologies are a part of most, if not all, operating systems today (even Windows!). But, a fun article, and I'm always happy to see Plan 9 crop up fro…

> Plan 9-based technologies are a part of most, if not all, operating systems today (even Windows!). 9p is indeed a great technology—I would have also thrown in utf-8—but most of plan9's ideas remain quite fringe. I would pay a ton of money for an OS with both bind and browser support. Plumber is still leagues better than anything offered by macs/linux/windows. That said, I don't see "fringe" as being mutually exclus…

> TempleOS had some features that other OS's could use, too—its use of hyperlinking is actually really cool.

If you want to see what doldoc and plumbing in one system might look like, check out Oberon[1].

[1] - http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/04/22/oberon/

Re: A Week with Plan 9

#20

Post by hemloc_io »

pjmlp wrote: post #5

> Plan 9 is as filled with unpolished brilliance as Mozart’s Requiem. It’s the Sagrada Familia of Operating Systems. It’s creators left long ago but people keep building on the scaffolds. If nothing else, it’s a collection of fantastic ideas never intended for mass consumption. This is The Holy Mountain of Operating Systems. Yes, they moved into Inferno, and implemented Alef ideas in Limbo. http://www.vitanuova.com/i…

HA! This reminded me of the OS class I took in college.

Every professor other than mine taught Linux, but he made us learn Inferno. (One of the best learning experiences of my time there!)

If you're interested in the inner workings of Inferno he literally wrote the, only(?), book on it. There are a couple free excerpts available on his site.[0]

[0] https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~bls96/

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