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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 broke
by jsolson 6y ago
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 suite against new VM releases.
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.
- Technically 6y agoI know that Russ Cox & Rob Pike both still use plan9.
- housel 6y agoDo we know what distribution they use?
- Technically 6y agoNo; however, drivers are pretty easily portable among the distros. The differences are mostly userspace details and driver selection. I can't imagine they have difficulty navigating their own setups.
- smorrow 6y agohttp://aiju.de/b/mac http://aiju.de/b/mac
- jeromenerf 6y agoSome 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.
- floren 6y agoAcme 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.
- sleepydog 6y agoThe multi-line tag also helps a lot outside of plan9 because the file paths on plan9 tend to be shorter thanks to the per-process namespaces. e.g. instead of /home/$user/projects/foo you can just bind that to /prj/foo or whatever you like.
- jsolson 6y agoI certainly knew about the connections between Go (and so very much other stuff at Google) and Plan 9. I was surprised, at the time, to see the OS itself in use in a production role. Just another example of unexpected tools getting the job done.
- butterisgood 6y agoCoraid produces ATA over Ethernet storage platforms shipping their own fork of Plan 9 on the devices. If I had a need for it, or could justify the cash, I'd get one just to play around!
- rbanffy 6y agoI once almost bought a massive Xerox printer from a graphics shop that was decommissioning it. It had a Xerox Star (running some specialized software) for its brains. In the end, the workstation was so completely fused to the printer I'd end with a car-sized workstation.
- butterisgood 6y agoPlan9Port works on Mac OS, Linux, several BSDs etc, and I'm nearly 100% certain existed before Russ moved to google. It pre-dates Go by a bit for sure, and Go was already underway at Google with Rob Pike before Russ came over (per my recollection). That said, I too use plan9port, on my mac, for Acme mainly. Russ just fixed up the thread library so it works more uniformly (and correctly) on all platforms - including Apple Silicon.
- MisterTea 6y ago> 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.
- ori_b 6y agoYes, it is working on the latest releases. Note that for 9front tip, there's one small patch that you need: https://github.com/golang/go/pull/43533 https://github.com/golang/go/pull/43533