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> Plan 9 front is my daily driver If emacs, SBCL & Firefox ran on Plan 9, I would see no reason to bother running Linux on hardware. But they don’t, and they

by rauhl 7y ago

> Plan 9 front is my daily driver If emacs, SBCL & Firefox ran on Plan 9, I would see no reason to bother running Linux on hardware. But they don’t, and they probably never will. Maybe when I retire I’ll have time to work on porting them, but I have a long time until then!

MisterTea 7y ago
Those are orthogonal problems to plan 9. tl;dr all this runs in vmx(3), though it is still in its infancy and slow as molasses but working good enough to scrape by. Emacs is a poor fit as it already is an OS. plan 9, an operating system which encourages programs to talk to each other, offers no advantages to a monolithic text editing operating system. You're better off learning sam or acme and learn how they interact with the platform which is where their power comes from. That's how you use plan 9, you work with it, harness it. It's a kind of "be one with the os" zen thing. SBCL I have no experience with but my guess is all the tooling and libraries are built around a 50 year old operating system. Porting languages isn't that big a deal, we have a buch like ocaml, python, Go, pforth, and maybe hugs/haskell among others. The issues are libraries which assume some unholy assortment of unix/posix/linux/whatever bindings and dependencies. plus we have no c++ because few at bell labs thought much of it even though they spawned it. Tells you something. Firefox. The big one. The modern web browser is a primitive document viewer from the 90's which borrowed ideas put forth some 25+ years earlier by Ted Nelson and others in the 1960's and demonstrated by Doug Englebert in the MOAD. Now it can run computer code while displaying video, audio, text and images on your already existing computer. In plan 9 we would use separate tools to accomplish these tasks. A web browser would at most need to render html, ccs and handle basic javascript. The more complex stuff like pdf, audio and video should be plumbed to external programs which can be removed or swapped out as needed.
- rauhl 7y ago
  > You're better off learning sam or acme I beg to differ. Emacs is an excellent text-based operating environment, simply the best, without peer. I’ve used sam & acme, and they don’t compare. > SBCL I have no experience with but my guess is all the tooling and libraries are built around a 50 year old operating system. Some of the hairiest bits of Lisp (e.g. the pathname abstraction) are due to the fact that it doesn’t assume Unix. Regardless, while I would prefer to boot directly into some sort of 21st-century Lisp OS which takes a lot of great ideas from Plan 9, that doesn’t exist; Plan 9 does. And if I ever get the spare time I intend to port Emacs & SBCL. And hope someone else will port Firefox.

by rauhl 7y ago

MisterTea 7y ago

Those are orthogonal problems to plan 9. tl;dr all this runs in vmx(3), though it is still in its infancy and slow as molasses but working good enough to scrape by. Emacs is a poor fit as it already is an OS. plan 9, an operating system which encourages programs to talk to each other, offers no advantages to a monolithic text editing operating system. You're better off learning sam or acme and learn how they interact with the platform which is where their power comes from. That's how you use plan 9, you work with it, harness it. It's a kind of "be one with the os" zen thing. SBCL I have no experience with but my guess is all the tooling and libraries are built around a 50 year old operating system. Porting languages isn't that big a deal, we have a buch like ocaml, python, Go, pforth, and maybe hugs/haskell among others. The issues are libraries which assume some unholy assortment of unix/posix/linux/whatever bindings and dependencies. plus we have no c++ because few at bell labs thought much of it even though they spawned it. Tells you something. Firefox. The big one. The modern web browser is a primitive document viewer from the 90's which borrowed ideas put forth some 25+ years earlier by Ted Nelson and others in the 1960's and demonstrated by Doug Englebert in the MOAD. Now it can run computer code while displaying video, audio, text and images on your already existing computer. In plan 9 we would use separate tools to accomplish these tasks. A web browser would at most need to render html, ccs and handle basic javascript. The more complex stuff like pdf, audio and video should be plumbed to external programs which can be removed or swapped out as needed.

rauhl 7y ago
> You're better off learning sam or acme I beg to differ. Emacs is an excellent text-based operating environment, simply the best, without peer. I’ve used sam & acme, and they don’t compare. > SBCL I have no experience with but my guess is all the tooling and libraries are built around a 50 year old operating system. Some of the hairiest bits of Lisp (e.g. the pathname abstraction) are due to the fact that it doesn’t assume Unix. Regardless, while I would prefer to boot directly into some sort of 21st-century Lisp OS which takes a lot of great ideas from Plan 9, that doesn’t exist; Plan 9 does. And if I ever get the spare time I intend to port Emacs & SBCL. And hope someone else will port Firefox.