6 ms·

Some 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 mo

Some 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 ago
Acme 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 ago
  The 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Coraid 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 ago
    I 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 ago
Plan9Port 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.
- octetta 6y ago
  I saw the thread fix-up recently. Based on the comments, it seems setcontext/getcontext versus pthreads is becoming less of an issue these days.
  - butterisgood 6y ago
    Well one is supposed to implement cooperatively scheduled coroutines, and the other is pthreads.
deckard1 6y ago
Google+ wasn't good for much, but following Rob Pike was always interesting as he was doing Plan 9 stuff and talking about Go often on there. Linus Torvalds also frequently posted on G+ and was interesting. Twitter just doesn't fill that same space.
simias 6y ago
I like minimalist and sometimes esoteric dev environments but I must confess that I just don't get acme. I know that some people swear by it but it's hard for me not to think that it's the programming equivalent of listening to music on vinyls. For one thing it's extremely mouse-driven, which is already disqualifying in my book but to each their own. The whole "anything can be a tag and you can execute it by clicking the middle mouse button" can seem novel and exciting if you've never used Emacs, which did the whole "everything is configurable and scriptable" a long time ago and IMO better. Then the lack of syntax highlighting is pure elitism in my book. I tried to give that a chance but when you listen to the arguments of its proponents it often boils down to "colors are childish" and "books are black on white and we read those just fine" which makes complete sense unless you think about it for two seconds. I genuinely don't get it. When I first read a Vi(m) tutorial it seemed esoteric, complicated and weird, but I understood why some people found it more efficient that way. Watching somebody explain acme reminds me of TempleOS, filled with weird idiosyncrasies of dubious usefulness while lacking super basic features.
- egypturnash 6y ago
  "books are black on white and we read those just fine" Now I wanna see a B&W syntax highlighting setup that uses all the tools available to a book. Font sizes, bold/italics, the use of display fonts here and there, including Comic Sans to highlight Really Bad Ideas...
  - ywei3410 6y ago
    You laugh but I'm half-way there; I use underlines/bold for things like TODOS/FIXMES, different fonts for comments, different weight for brackets/keywords etc...
    - egypturnash 6y ago
      I’m not laughing at all, I am all for anything that gets people thinking about how shitty most digital typography is compared to what’s in a well-designed book!
  - 6y ago

floren 6y ago

Acme 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 ago
The 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 ago

I 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 ago
Coraid 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 ago
  I 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 ago

Plan9Port 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.

octetta 6y ago
I saw the thread fix-up recently. Based on the comments, it seems setcontext/getcontext versus pthreads is becoming less of an issue these days.
- butterisgood 6y ago
  Well one is supposed to implement cooperatively scheduled coroutines, and the other is pthreads.

deckard1 6y ago

Google+ wasn't good for much, but following Rob Pike was always interesting as he was doing Plan 9 stuff and talking about Go often on there. Linus Torvalds also frequently posted on G+ and was interesting. Twitter just doesn't fill that same space.

simias 6y ago

I like minimalist and sometimes esoteric dev environments but I must confess that I just don't get acme. I know that some people swear by it but it's hard for me not to think that it's the programming equivalent of listening to music on vinyls. For one thing it's extremely mouse-driven, which is already disqualifying in my book but to each their own. The whole "anything can be a tag and you can execute it by clicking the middle mouse button" can seem novel and exciting if you've never used Emacs, which did the whole "everything is configurable and scriptable" a long time ago and IMO better. Then the lack of syntax highlighting is pure elitism in my book. I tried to give that a chance but when you listen to the arguments of its proponents it often boils down to "colors are childish" and "books are black on white and we read those just fine" which makes complete sense unless you think about it for two seconds. I genuinely don't get it. When I first read a Vi(m) tutorial it seemed esoteric, complicated and weird, but I understood why some people found it more efficient that way. Watching somebody explain acme reminds me of TempleOS, filled with weird idiosyncrasies of dubious usefulness while lacking super basic features.

egypturnash 6y ago
"books are black on white and we read those just fine" Now I wanna see a B&W syntax highlighting setup that uses all the tools available to a book. Font sizes, bold/italics, the use of display fonts here and there, including Comic Sans to highlight Really Bad Ideas...
- ywei3410 6y ago
  You laugh but I'm half-way there; I use underlines/bold for things like TODOS/FIXMES, different fonts for comments, different weight for brackets/keywords etc...
  - egypturnash 6y ago
    I’m not laughing at all, I am all for anything that gets people thinking about how shitty most digital typography is compared to what’s in a well-designed book!
- 6y ago