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Ask HN: Why isn't Plan9 popular?

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

#31

Post by kunley »

pwpwp wrote: post #9

A lot of Plan 9 innovations have appeared in Linux. One of the outstanding issues are union aka. overlay filesystems , and these are currently being addressed. That said, Plan 9 seems to see continued use in some niches. For example, Plan 9 has been ported to Blue Gene. (What's kinda cute is that the Plan 9 kernel (including TCP and such) has fewer lines of code than the Ruby parser , 8000 vs 10000, IIRC.)

I'd add union/overlay filesystems are in FreeBSD since at least 6.1 and became stable ca 2007. I use this stuff quite often.

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

#32

Post by konad »

adbge wrote: post #3

"Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." - Eric S. Raymond…

Plan9 doesn't have releases, it has continual development.

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

#33

Post by protomyth »

runjake wrote: post #18

1. It's not marketed -- professionally or at a grassroots level. 2. It's a research OS not necessarily meant for every day use.

I totally agree. From the one-off-not-quite-compatible license to no marketing from Lucent to no real niche to lets try Limbo, Plan 9 never got a firm base with marketing.

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

#34

Post by IdeaHamster »

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 allows heavily interactive programs to run across multiple machines with cache coherency fully guaranteed in all respects. This also involves being able to chop up resources, including the cpu by way of a controlled VM context, for safe assignment to unsecured third-party clusters over the internet (though the security of such clusters itself might be in doubt, the first and most important thing is for systems donating resources to not be made vulnerable through their donation).

If anyone truly "gets" cloud computing, it's these guys. And they have the advantage of not being quite as big of a jump from existing systems as Plan 9 is.

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

#35

Post by konad »

I've been a Plan9 user/dev since 2000. Have been to two of the IWP9 conferences - sadly I won't be going to Seattle for the 5th unless I score some big cash in the next few weeks - http://iwp9.quanstro.net/

* Licensing - Plan9 wasn't open when open was the in thing.

* No web browser - just as the web became a big thing, no web browser is a deathtrap.

* The gap is too great a leap - until the recent LinuxEMU almost NONE of your fave apps were available - unless you really like cmd line tools (I do :)

* Hard to justify in your organisation - when you're one of only 50 people in the world that know how to use an OS, making it part of your infrastructure is a huge risk.

That said, to suggest it is a failure is erroneous. We have at least one successful company using Plan9 in their hardware - Coraid. They have the commitment, income and a few of those 50 people to make it work for them. IBM also use it on Blue Gene and other super computers, as do Sandia National Labs, LANL and others around the world. It was also used at the Sydney Olympics to control the stadium lighting and Lucent use it in their cell phone masts in Real Time mode.

Come and chat to people in irc://irc.freenode.org/#plan9

Oh - there's also a fantastic port of many of the tools into Linux / BSD. http://swtch.com/plan9port I use them every day - Venti is particularly useful

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

#36

Post by tomotomo »

Similar situation to why weren't other featureful alternative OSs more popular? Like BeOS? Imagine how different today's world would be if Apple had bought BeOS instead of NeXTSTEP (which included Steve Jobs)? Often it's some large corporation's decisions that dictate what technology gets adopted, what fails.

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

#37

Post by JoachimSchipper »

stcredzero wrote: post #26
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.

Very C-like, I'd wager.

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

#38

Post by kree10 »

davidw wrote: post #2

They open sourced it too late for it to get much traction, I think. Also, does it solve any particular problem in such a way that it can't be ignored? Doesn't seem like it to me.

I think you're right. Plan9's first "public" (to universities only) release was 1992, when Linux was just getting off the ground and the FreeBSD & NetBSD projects did not yet exist. People interested in Linux or 386BSD at the time would have probably tried Plan9 if they could have.

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

#39

Post by wazoox »

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…

I don't know, they'vr got some coverage with HAMMER a couple of years ago, but where did it lead them?

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

#40

Post by philwelch »

jbarham wrote: post #30
alnayyir wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can use Java's concurrency features to implement better concurrency features (as opposed to the language just giving you better concurrency features from the outset), which is presumably what was meant by "less opinionated" or "library-centric". You can have asynchronous or synchronous message passing or STM on mutable references to immutable data or really anything built on top of Java, but an opinionated language like Go just picks something (synchronous message passing in Go's case) and makes you use it.[1]

[1] You can implement asynchronous message passing on top of synchronous message passing, but not the other way around. Presumably the "least opinionated" language would simply give you the concurrency primitive with which you can implement the greatest number of other concurrency primitives, which presumably[2] is locks.

[2] I could be wrong about this.

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