Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

tailscale.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 100 posts

Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

#91

Post by adriangrigore »

lunarlull wrote: post #87
adriangrigore wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, convince Russ and some investors! :D I would laugh my ass off for years at this joke! Yeah, please do this next year's April Fools'!

> I would laugh my ass off for years at this joke! I don't really get the 'joke'? Porting a full web browser to Plan 9 would seem like a cool project - where's the humor?

You're making me explain this whole post. :p

Their April Fools' jokes are real and work as you can see in the submitted link.

So basically, a Plan 9 web browser, would be a great April Fools' prank! (because, again, their "pranks" are real and work)

Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

#92

Post by kristianp »

packetlost wrote: post #10

I unironically wish there was an enterprise version of Plan 9. I've been writing most of my scripts in `rc` (something my coworkers put up with because we use nix and I can pull it in automatically with dirnev) and it has been great.

One benefit of rc is this[1]:

> The most important principle in rc’s design is that it’s not a macro processor. Input is never scanned more than once by the lexical and syntactic analysis code

I worked at a unix shop that deleted most of a working drive because a shell script was modified while it was running. Luckily they kept daily backups on tape. This was about 17 years ago.

[1] https://www.scs.stanford.edu/nyu/04fa/sched/readings/rc.pdf

Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

#93

Post by naikrovek »

rsc, rob pike, and bradfitz are three people I could talk to for hours, completely wasting their time, especially about Plan9.

That OS fascinates me.

I remember early in my career when an expert I worked with could sit with me and patiently show me how to do something and let me ask questions for however long it took me to understand well enough what to do and how to swim if I fell in the deep end of whatever they wanted me to do. It was some of the fastest upskilling that I have ever done in my career, like getting a bachelors degree worth of very specific knowledge in three hours.

I don’t know C and I don’t know enough about Plan 9 to use it productively for anything, but it has some extremely cool and useful features that I want to know more about and learn how to use, even if it is only so that I can lament the non-existence of those features in the big three operating systems today.

If I had the money I would probably pay to get face time with all three of those folks for expanding my Go knowledge and rsc and rob pike for the plan 9 understanding that I have always wanted, but have never been able to give myself.

Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

#94

Post by naikrovek »

MisterTea wrote: post #56
pbohun wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone needs to convince Russ that it would be hilarious to have a full featured web browser in Plan 9.

On 9 front there's vmx which is hardware virtualization. You can boot a Linux kernel with an nfs root from the local machine and use headless vnc to run a browser in a vnc client window. I'd also like to point out that most users of Plan 9 dislike web technology because it's a giant nightmare of code. No one human can even begin to comprehend the code base of Chrome, let alone Firefox - programs that are as big, if n…

> a single human can grasp plan 9 code from the kernel to user space.

Is that true? I cloned the 2015 release of plan 9 a week or so ago and it had around a million lines of C. Can a single person hold all of that? I sure as hell can’t.

Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

#95

Post by packetlost »

adriangrigore wrote: post #89
zozbot234 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless someone does a great deal of effort to port all of those environments that people want (nodejs, modern python, etc) you're going to be stuck using a VM and losing a lot of the benefit. It should not be a huge deal of effort since as you mention the plan9 syscall API is simpler than on Linux. The added plan9 support could then also serve as a kind of "toy" backend that could make the rest of the code more und…

The problem is porting the compilers! There is no C++ compiler on Plan 9.

Yeah, but also the type of person who is going to use Plan 9 isn't going to want to write C++, of all languages.

The general problem stands though, almost no languages support Plan 9

Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

#96

Post by lunarlull »

adriangrigore wrote: post #91
lunarlull wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would laugh my ass off for years at this joke! I don't really get the 'joke'? Porting a full web browser to Plan 9 would seem like a cool project - where's the humor?

You're making me explain this whole post. :p Their April Fools' jokes are real and work as you can see in the submitted link. So basically, a Plan 9 web browser, would be a great April Fools' prank! (because, again, their "pranks" are real and work)

Ah thanks for explaining lol, got it!

Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

#97

Post by INTPenis »

bradfitz wrote: post #35
INTPenis wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

We actually have that nowadays... the config file support to tailscaled, as Irbe mentioned on the bug Jan 2024: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/1412#issuecomm...

Yeah I did find that in my quest but nowhere is this config file defined. I have no idea what to put into it so it's useless to me.

Also while I have you here, the tailscale container image lacks iptables support, making it useless.

Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

#98

Post by LukeShu »

kristianp wrote: post #92
packetlost wrote: post #10

I unironically wish there was an enterprise version of Plan 9. I've been writing most of my scripts in `rc` (something my coworkers put up with because we use nix and I can pull it in automatically with dirnev) and it has been great.

One benefit of rc is this[1]: > The most important principle in rc’s design is that it’s not a macro processor. Input is never scanned more than once by the lexical and syntactic analysis code I worked at a unix shop that deleted most of a working drive because a shell script was modified while it was running. Luckily they kept daily backups on tape. This was about 17 years ago. [1] https://www.scs.stanford.edu/nyu/0…

Scanning input just is unrelated to the "modified while running" problem. The "modified while running" problem is a read-buffering problem.

For example, consider the following change:

    -echo $x; rm -rf /n/foobar/
    +rm -rf /n/foobar/
     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
If the shell's first read() reads 16 bytes (indicated above with "^"), then the file is changed, then the shell reads the rest; then the shell will see "echo $x; rm -rf /" regardless of whether or not it scans the input multiple times.

I am unfamiliar with the read-buffering done by either of the 2 main implementations of rc, and so am unable to comment on whether it does things to avoid this problem. But if it does do things to avoid it, those things are orthogonal to the "not a macro processor / input is never scanned more than once" thing.

Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

#99

Post by pjmlp »

pbohun wrote: post #59
MisterTea wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On 9 front there's vmx which is hardware virtualization. You can boot a Linux kernel with an nfs root from the local machine and use headless vnc to run a browser in a vnc client window. I'd also like to point out that most users of Plan 9 dislike web technology because it's a giant nightmare of code. No one human can even begin to comprehend the code base of Chrome, let alone Firefox - programs that are as big, if n…

Oh yes I absolutely agree. I would definitely like to completely replace the web. It's just that in order to (currently) do my banking, pay my bills, book airline tickets, order from Amazon, etc. I must use a browser. If I could escape all that I would run Plan 9 exclusively without another OS or hacks to access a browser from another OS/virtual machine.

Even though most of the UIs I work on nowadays are Web based, I miss the native apps with Internet protocols, and most of my side projects are native apps, nothing to do with Web.

Re: Porting Tailscale to Plan 9

#100

Post by MisterTea »

naikrovek wrote: post #94
MisterTea wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On 9 front there's vmx which is hardware virtualization. You can boot a Linux kernel with an nfs root from the local machine and use headless vnc to run a browser in a vnc client window. I'd also like to point out that most users of Plan 9 dislike web technology because it's a giant nightmare of code. No one human can even begin to comprehend the code base of Chrome, let alone Firefox - programs that are as big, if n…

> a single human can grasp plan 9 code from the kernel to user space. Is that true? I cloned the 2015 release of plan 9 a week or so ago and it had around a million lines of C. Can a single person hold all of that? I sure as hell can’t.

You can, just not all at once.

And which plan 9 release and when? Ghostscript and Python were originally distributed with 9front which are both HUGE compared to the rest of the system. Remove those and its much, much smaller. Unsure if ghostscript was included in vanilla 9 from the labs. Python was included in 9front because it was necessary for mercurial. Once git9 arrived python was nuked from base and removed many lines of code. Ghostscript is next to go from base once pdffs is running (patches welcome.)

Post reply on HN