14 ms·

So, why Plan 9?

78 points by pmarin 16y ago

kia 16y ago
From one of the replies in the thread: You could have pointed out that the entire source tree is smaller than the gcc manual.
acqq 16y ago
Note that even pros must use some tricks to run something of it on the modern hardware, so it appears as it's still mostly an experimental research platform? http://www.mail-archive.com/9fans@9fans.net/msg17086.html http://www.mail-archive.com/9fans@9fans.net/msg17086.html "I am typing this in acme in 9vx running on FreeBSD, using the rio port in P9P for my window manager. Because I'm away from my home network, I'm running 9vx with the the root on my local machine. When I'm at home, I use 9vx booting with its root taken from a real Plan 9 file server. I also run it on qemu fairly often."
cturner 16y ago
On topic of running old OSs in virtualisation, I purchased and installed "VirtualAcorn" and took delivery yesterday. It's RiscOS-in-a-box. I'm running on top of OSX. My motivation is I have a friend who composes, and is still using a twenty-year-old acorn running the original release of Sibelius on floppy disks. He bought it directly from the Finn's apartment door back in the day. We thought it might be a good idea to get his life's work off this collection of ancient hardware and floppies :) It has a command-line, but I haven't worked it out yet.
- barrkel 16y ago
  I remember programming on Acorn A3000 or similar, nearly 20 years back. I used to program on display models in computer shops, as my family couldn't afford to buy one. I seem to recall hitting a function key to get a command prompt at the bottom of the screen, and further dialog with the command line caused the rest of the GUI to scroll off screen with each new line printed. I programmed in its dialect of BASIC, which was - I recall - like a Commodore 64 on steroids. I was impressed, in a way which I wasn't by QBasic on PCs, because I had yet to learn the benefits of structured programming, and missed the line numbers on the PC. Thinking back, I think it auto-numbered lines as you hit return, like this: 10 PRINT "Hello"<press Return here> 20 | I remember that in particular being major improvement over the C64; I had seen so little, and had very few resources to learn from.
- rikthevik 16y ago
  I ran into Acorn installed on some digital cable set-top boxes I was working on reverse engineering a few years ago. Very impressive that your friend is still composing using such an ancient machine.
jpr 16y ago
Because OpenBSD community isn't arrogant enough for you.
jacquesm 16y ago
Plan 9 is actually a great little OS, it is where linux could be if it wanted to badly enough. Instead we're stuck with early 70's technology. Which is good enough, but it could be so much better if not for a bunch of NIH and ego. No disrespect to the kernel devs, they're doing a great job. But longer term I wish there was some more real innovation instead of just a slightly better (and free) mousetrap. For another interesting take on OSes look at QnX.
- derefr 16y ago
  Perhaps a group could make a Linux distro with the goal of forking, and Plan9ifying, the source of every package they ship. No one would have to use the resulting distro (other than to demo the neat way that the Plan9ified packages integrate so easily with one another) but the original authors/maintainers of the upstream packages could adopt the Plan9ification patches a la carte, gradually increasing Plan9ification across the board. The patches of one package would always be guaranteed to work with the patches from any other, as the resulting combination has to hang together in the demo distro—and, since this would only be an eventual goal of the group, they would also have to make sure that all their patches didn't expect any Plan9ification on any other package's part.
  - anant 16y ago
    Disclaimer: I'm the author of the Glendix project. As someone already pointed out Glendix tries to bring binaries over to make Linux feel more Plan9-ish. Unfortunately, I no longer have the luxury of being a grad student and so my time these days is very limited and have had to move on to other things. But if there's someone motivated enough to push Glendix further, I'd be more than happy to help! As for the question of 'Why Plan 9', to put it simply - reading the source code makes me feel like a hacker again. A long time ago if you didn't understand how something worked, you could just peek at the source and everything would be clear. Plan 9 maintains that, the source code /is/ the documentation. Alas, I wish I could say the same of 'modern' free/open source software (Linux/BSD/GNU/what have you).
    - anon_d 16y ago
wazoox 16y ago
Don't forget to try Plan9 for user space, the Plan9 utilities ported to POSIX systems.
mhd 16y ago
Why I agree that the everything-is-a-file approach that Plan 9 takes is pretty great, and it would be great if that would find a greater use in Linux or the BSDs (beyond /proc etc.), one has to take those comments about the size and quality of the code with a grain of salt. Once again, the last 20 percent of performance take 80 percent of the effort, and quite often about as much lines of code. And Linux/BSD had to be that highly optimized, or it would have failed in the server sector, probably wouldn't support as many architectures and weird hardware parts. Having said that, I guess that a lot of people would be happy with the level of support and speed Plan 9 supports, as hardware tends to merge (RIP MIPS, Sparc, 68k, PA-RISC, S3, Tseng, Token Ring…), and Moore's Law takes care of the rest.
- supersillyus 16y ago
  What you're saying makes sense to me, but do you have a citation for Plan9 being notably slower than Linux on equivalent hardware? Seems like it'd be trivially true unless there is a fantastic architectural advantage to plan9 somewhere, but I'd love to see some numbers.
  - mhd 16y ago
    It's been a while since I lurked on 9fans (after all the late adopting minimalist tiling window manager fanboys started coming in in droves), so I can't give you any links to recent comparisons. First of all, the comparison would be pretty unscientific if you include all the different variables. So let's say you want to test common server performance, then you'd probably do something like an apache bench for a web server. Now comes the problem: Apart from the kernel issues (memory management, ethernet driver, scheduling), you'll have different web servers, compiled with different C compilers. The GCC port for Plan 9 is ancient, and I'm not aware that e.g. Apache is running on it. Yes, you can simply test page loads/second with any technology available to any platform, and if you buy into the fact that everything you're doing is wrong (so not just Plan 9 vs Linux, but also gcc vs. 8c, apache vs pegasus etc.), well…
onan_barbarian 16y ago
Some of the ideas in Plan 9 are utterly fantastic. /proc comes from Plan 9, and I remember being awed by the Plan 9 filesystem, which used memory and hard disks to cache a giant WORM jukebox (in the Bell Labs version, anyhow). I forget what the path was but you could just transparently go and have a look at the whole file system on any given day and wander around a read-only version of the fs for that day. I'm sure there's a lot out there that looks like this now, but this was in 1992/1993. The compiler was also cool as hell but lacked any of the aggressive optimizations that even gcc has now. It was very much oriented towards incredibly fast compile times rather than squeezing out the last x% of performance through optimization. I believe that the go compiler is a descendant of this one. On the negative side, it was a very insular culture with an attitude that 'things we don't need to do aren't worth doing'. Avoiding shared libraries is fine, I guess, as is having a minimalist GUI approach. But telling people that shared libraries suck and shouldn't be used and using the fact that _you've_ got a tiny static library that does all the GUI stuff _you_ need as proof seems a bit rich, when the GUI that you produced doesn't have any of the conventional features of a GUI library. When so many things are being changed at once it's pretty easy to conflate two unrelated things into a 'win' (e.g. 'haha, we don't have a lame shared library system on our machine, and by the way, Motif sucks anyhow'). It's fine up to a point but it was starting to ring very hollow when you had go to another machine to run a web browser that looks even faintly like an actual web browser. This may all have changed; it's been a long time since I had anything to do with P9. But I think the 90s are the point where Plan 9 decisively 'missed the boat' and the insularity and general attitude was part of the problem. If 'ape' (ANSI Posix environment) had been better maintained and taken seriously Plan 9 might have been considerably more popular and its alternate (frequently superior) ways of doing things might have taken off.
sz 16y ago
getting things right the first time around is much more of a practical matter than you may at first realize.

78 points by pmarin 16y ago

kia 16y ago

From one of the replies in the thread: You could have pointed out that the entire source tree is smaller than the gcc manual.

acqq 16y ago

Note that even pros must use some tricks to run something of it on the modern hardware, so it appears as it's still mostly an experimental research platform? http://www.mail-archive.com/9fans@9fans.net/msg17086.html http://www.mail-archive.com/9fans@9fans.net/msg17086.html "I am typing this in acme in 9vx running on FreeBSD, using the rio port in P9P for my window manager. Because I'm away from my home network, I'm running 9vx with the the root on my local machine. When I'm at home, I use 9vx booting with its root taken from a real Plan 9 file server. I also run it on qemu fairly often."

cturner 16y ago

On topic of running old OSs in virtualisation, I purchased and installed "VirtualAcorn" and took delivery yesterday. It's RiscOS-in-a-box. I'm running on top of OSX. My motivation is I have a friend who composes, and is still using a twenty-year-old acorn running the original release of Sibelius on floppy disks. He bought it directly from the Finn's apartment door back in the day. We thought it might be a good idea to get his life's work off this collection of ancient hardware and floppies :) It has a command-line, but I haven't worked it out yet.

barrkel 16y ago
I remember programming on Acorn A3000 or similar, nearly 20 years back. I used to program on display models in computer shops, as my family couldn't afford to buy one. I seem to recall hitting a function key to get a command prompt at the bottom of the screen, and further dialog with the command line caused the rest of the GUI to scroll off screen with each new line printed. I programmed in its dialect of BASIC, which was - I recall - like a Commodore 64 on steroids. I was impressed, in a way which I wasn't by QBasic on PCs, because I had yet to learn the benefits of structured programming, and missed the line numbers on the PC. Thinking back, I think it auto-numbered lines as you hit return, like this: 10 PRINT "Hello"<press Return here> 20 | I remember that in particular being major improvement over the C64; I had seen so little, and had very few resources to learn from.
rikthevik 16y ago
I ran into Acorn installed on some digital cable set-top boxes I was working on reverse engineering a few years ago. Very impressive that your friend is still composing using such an ancient machine.

jpr 16y ago

Because OpenBSD community isn't arrogant enough for you.

jacquesm 16y ago

Plan 9 is actually a great little OS, it is where linux could be if it wanted to badly enough. Instead we're stuck with early 70's technology. Which is good enough, but it could be so much better if not for a bunch of NIH and ego. No disrespect to the kernel devs, they're doing a great job. But longer term I wish there was some more real innovation instead of just a slightly better (and free) mousetrap. For another interesting take on OSes look at QnX.

derefr 16y ago
Perhaps a group could make a Linux distro with the goal of forking, and Plan9ifying, the source of every package they ship. No one would have to use the resulting distro (other than to demo the neat way that the Plan9ified packages integrate so easily with one another) but the original authors/maintainers of the upstream packages could adopt the Plan9ification patches a la carte, gradually increasing Plan9ification across the board. The patches of one package would always be guaranteed to work with the patches from any other, as the resulting combination has to hang together in the demo distro—and, since this would only be an eventual goal of the group, they would also have to make sure that all their patches didn't expect any Plan9ification on any other package's part.
- anant 16y ago
  Disclaimer: I'm the author of the Glendix project. As someone already pointed out Glendix tries to bring binaries over to make Linux feel more Plan9-ish. Unfortunately, I no longer have the luxury of being a grad student and so my time these days is very limited and have had to move on to other things. But if there's someone motivated enough to push Glendix further, I'd be more than happy to help! As for the question of 'Why Plan 9', to put it simply - reading the source code makes me feel like a hacker again. A long time ago if you didn't understand how something worked, you could just peek at the source and everything would be clear. Plan 9 maintains that, the source code /is/ the documentation. Alas, I wish I could say the same of 'modern' free/open source software (Linux/BSD/GNU/what have you).
  - anon_d 16y ago

wazoox 16y ago

Don't forget to try Plan9 for user space, the Plan9 utilities ported to POSIX systems.

mhd 16y ago

Why I agree that the everything-is-a-file approach that Plan 9 takes is pretty great, and it would be great if that would find a greater use in Linux or the BSDs (beyond /proc etc.), one has to take those comments about the size and quality of the code with a grain of salt. Once again, the last 20 percent of performance take 80 percent of the effort, and quite often about as much lines of code. And Linux/BSD had to be that highly optimized, or it would have failed in the server sector, probably wouldn't support as many architectures and weird hardware parts. Having said that, I guess that a lot of people would be happy with the level of support and speed Plan 9 supports, as hardware tends to merge (RIP MIPS, Sparc, 68k, PA-RISC, S3, Tseng, Token Ring…), and Moore's Law takes care of the rest.

supersillyus 16y ago
What you're saying makes sense to me, but do you have a citation for Plan9 being notably slower than Linux on equivalent hardware? Seems like it'd be trivially true unless there is a fantastic architectural advantage to plan9 somewhere, but I'd love to see some numbers.
- mhd 16y ago
  It's been a while since I lurked on 9fans (after all the late adopting minimalist tiling window manager fanboys started coming in in droves), so I can't give you any links to recent comparisons. First of all, the comparison would be pretty unscientific if you include all the different variables. So let's say you want to test common server performance, then you'd probably do something like an apache bench for a web server. Now comes the problem: Apart from the kernel issues (memory management, ethernet driver, scheduling), you'll have different web servers, compiled with different C compilers. The GCC port for Plan 9 is ancient, and I'm not aware that e.g. Apache is running on it. Yes, you can simply test page loads/second with any technology available to any platform, and if you buy into the fact that everything you're doing is wrong (so not just Plan 9 vs Linux, but also gcc vs. 8c, apache vs pegasus etc.), well…

onan_barbarian 16y ago

Some of the ideas in Plan 9 are utterly fantastic. /proc comes from Plan 9, and I remember being awed by the Plan 9 filesystem, which used memory and hard disks to cache a giant WORM jukebox (in the Bell Labs version, anyhow). I forget what the path was but you could just transparently go and have a look at the whole file system on any given day and wander around a read-only version of the fs for that day. I'm sure there's a lot out there that looks like this now, but this was in 1992/1993. The compiler was also cool as hell but lacked any of the aggressive optimizations that even gcc has now. It was very much oriented towards incredibly fast compile times rather than squeezing out the last x% of performance through optimization. I believe that the go compiler is a descendant of this one. On the negative side, it was a very insular culture with an attitude that 'things we don't need to do aren't worth doing'. Avoiding shared libraries is fine, I guess, as is having a minimalist GUI approach. But telling people that shared libraries suck and shouldn't be used and using the fact that _you've_ got a tiny static library that does all the GUI stuff _you_ need as proof seems a bit rich, when the GUI that you produced doesn't have any of the conventional features of a GUI library. When so many things are being changed at once it's pretty easy to conflate two unrelated things into a 'win' (e.g. 'haha, we don't have a lame shared library system on our machine, and by the way, Motif sucks anyhow'). It's fine up to a point but it was starting to ring very hollow when you had go to another machine to run a web browser that looks even faintly like an actual web browser. This may all have changed; it's been a long time since I had anything to do with P9. But I think the 90s are the point where Plan 9 decisively 'missed the boat' and the insularity and general attitude was part of the problem. If 'ape' (ANSI Posix environment) had been better maintained and taken seriously Plan 9 might have been considerably more popular and its alternate (frequently superior) ways of doing things might have taken off.

sz 16y ago

getting things right the first time around is much more of a practical matter than you may at first realize.