11 ms·

As of someone who discovered Plan 9 far too late to do anything about it: everything is a poor man's Plan 9 something. Everything. All of it. Plan 9 lived in t

As of someone who discovered Plan 9 far too late to do anything about it: everything is a poor man's Plan 9 something. Everything. All of it. Plan 9 lived in the goddamned future.

klysm 3y ago
Did it live too far in the future for the time?
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Just as its sucessor, Inferno. Which is what ChromeOS and Android are mostly today, leaving C to the kernel, or tiny special purpose libs, and everything else in a managed language, Limbo.
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    And how close is Go to Limbo?
    - afr0ck 3y ago
      If I remember correctly, they have similar concurrency models. They were both written the same author as well, Rob Pike. Edit: fixed a typo
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Quite close, unsafe package and method declaration come from Oberon-2 (thanks Robert Griesemer), everything else is somehow inspired from Limbo. https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/limbo.html https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/limbo.html https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/docs.html https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/docs.html
pcwalton 3y ago
Looking at the Unix to Plan 9 translation [1] gives me a different opinion. To name one egregious example, omitting find(1) in favor of piping du(1) (what is supposed to be a disk usage analyzer) to grep(1) is not an improvement; it's just user-unfriendliness in service of minimalist aesthetics. (Contrary to popular belief, find(1) is not a particularly "bloated" program; Rust's "fd" implementation is under 7,000 lines of code [2], about a third of the size of Lua.) [1]: https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/Unix_to_Plan_9_command_translation/index.html https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/Unix_to_Plan_9_command_translation/... [2]: https://github.com/sharkdp/fd https://github.com/sharkdp/fd
- wbl 3y ago
  The problem with find is that it tries to put an entire programing language into its arguments.
  - pcwalton 3y ago
    I agree with you to some extent, but the solution is fd: change the tool's interface to make simple things easy. Deleting the tool entirely does nobody any favors. As bad as find(1) is for simple stuff, piping du(1) to grep(1) is worse.
    - comex 3y ago
      That's half of the solution. The other half, I'm convinced, will be a tool that makes complex things possible. After all, if I really need some complex filtering, find's primitive logical operators probably wouldn't even be sufficient. To that end, I love how Nushell's leading example on their home page is ls | where size > 10mb | sort-by modified It seems so elegant! Down with strings! …But it's not my life yet, since last time I wanted to try Nushell they didn't have scripting yet, and I have yet to circle back around to it. There's also Elvish and PowerShell and Oil Shell but they all have their own issues.
      - arp242 3y ago
        zsh solves this with globbing qualifiers: ls -t *(Lm+10) "L" for the "file size" qualifier (why "L"? For "less than size", I think – probably because "s" is already used for setuid), "m" for megabytes, "+" for "larger than". You can also add "om" or "Om" to sort by mtime, but ls will reorder it so you need the -t flag (or the -U flag to not sort things). The syntax is not easy, even byzantine, but it's a lot less to type and pretty convenient in interactive shells.
      - maleldil 3y ago
        > Nushell they didn't have scripting yet If you mean you couldn't run batch scripts from a file, they can do that now. There's an example repo with some community scripts. My favourite is how they handle CLI parsing: https://github.com/nushell/nu_scripts/blob/main/sourced/nu_101/flag.nu https://github.com/nushell/nu_scripts/blob/main/sourced/nu_1...
totallywrong 3y ago
Never tried but I remember reading it was very dependent on the mouse. I probably wouldn't like it.
- stefncb 3y ago
  It is, but for what it's worth using the mouse is much more pleasant than what we're used to ime. It's weird at first, especially with the teleporting thing but it works really well. Also, if you're gonna try it do it either with a proper three-button mouse or with a large-ish and easy to press scroll wheel button. Otherwise it's really frustrating.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    Just the idea of context switching from mouse to keyboard is so annoying to me outside of graphic editing. I installed vinium for firefox recently and it has been a game changer.
    - stefncb 3y ago
      That's fair and I share the sentiment to some degree, especially in "regular" systems. In the time period I used plan 9 I quickly got used to it though, and the method of interaction made me a bit slower and much more considerate. I liked it a lot. I still miss it. I'll probably try it again some time.
    - hardware2win 3y ago
      Context switch?? After longer usage you do that without any thinking
      - taeric 3y ago
        Ish. Just changing where you are oriented can impact how some people are thinking. By nature of their orientation. Moving to a mouse primes my brain to start thinking spatially about things. Which is not something I'm typically doing when looking at textual/symbolic things. I can see some value in doing it, of course.
thesuitonym 3y ago
I once saw Plan 9 described as "Imagine if all the stuff they told you about Unix was true." Edit to add: I don't know that this actually makes Plan 9 better, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't make it worse (Although from our perspective in 2023, it's definitely alien and difficult)
nine_k 3y ago
Plan 9 had many improvements over Unix of its times. It opened up too late to conquer the world though. Some good things from it were imported into Solaris and Linux later. Technological progress likes to reinvent itself, looping back to the same idea that did not work last time, and maybe making it a hit finally. Two examples: - Apple Newton, 1992 (a flop) -> Palm Pilot, 1997 (niche success) -> Apple iPhone, 2007 (world domination). - Java Virtual Machine, 1994 (server-side world domination, a flop in the browser) -> Inferno OS, from the makers of Unix and Plan9, 1996 (a flop) -> WASM (prospects of world domination in the browser).
- torginus 3y ago
  I personally don't like WASM. I think the Native Client (which is more than a decade old today) was a much better technical solution. It used actual cpu native assembly bundled with a verifier, and had actual good integration into low-level platform APIs like graphics, threading, etc. instead of using this weird Javascript bridge approach. Due to it being native code from the start, it also had none of the startup performance issues, that plague WebAssembly. WASI also seems like a wrong approach, considering it inherits the limitations of WASM, like problems with memory, allocation and multithreading and hacks needed to overcome them. VM-s are also kind of a wash for me too, since nowadays the most popular way to run software in a portable/sandboxed manner is Docker, which is NOT cpu-agnostic, even if you ran a JVM app in it, the bundled JVM would be CPU arch dependent.
  - nine_k 3y ago
    Actual CPU native assembly? It would need to support x86, x64, and aarch64 by now. (And likely RISC-5 in the near future.) The point of VMs like WASM is not (specifically) performance though, even if performance is desirable. It's the minimal, fixed standard, and the isolation. If you badly need native performance, develop a native application %)
    - vilunov 3y ago
      Or it could get translated to the target ISA by the user-agent Rosetta-style, suffering the same warmup issues, but only on some architectures.
prmoustache 3y ago
But what about security? I haven't really used it but from what I understood at first most of it is very elegant because at the time it was developped all nodes in a network could still be trusted.
tsss 3y ago
The same person who is involved with Plan 9 also made Go. Taking one look at that programming language doesn't leave me very optimistic about Plan 9.
- didntcheck 3y ago
  Agreed. Go is a shining example of Unix philosophy - but I don't mean that as a compliment. I mean it prioritizes ease of implementation over any other concerns and hence forces the user to reinvent many wheels. Forces round things into square holes, regardless of if that interface actually makes sense. And either completely ignores good ideas from other camps or goes sour grapes and claims they're overcomplicated and bad (then quietly tries to hack them on later) Worse is better than nothing, but when better has been demonstrated to exist, worse is just worse
  - phrenicfraud 3y ago
    I remember trying to figure out what's up with Go and left in complete disbelief when I was told that I need to install nginx on my local machine and fake a DNS entry just for go's package manager to "fetch" my local package from my local machine just so I could mess around with it how that works. All because I couldn't care less about 3rd party services like github.
    - bufio 3y ago
      User error.
    - lagniappe 3y ago
      you're holding it wrong
    - rakoo 3y ago
      That's never been and still isn't mandatory
- rhabarba 3y ago
  > The same person Go was designed by: - Robert Griesemer, known for nothing else, - Rob Pike, primarily known for sam(1), acme(1) and several other Plan 9 tools, the Blit (Unix's own graphical terminal), UTF-8 (with Ken Thompson), Inferno and Limbo, - and Ken Thompson, ancient god.
bmacho 3y ago
Can't everyone design a better OS than the current operating systems? More features, easier to use as a user, safer, easier to write programs for it, less bugs, more compatibility, etc. I am using operating systems for years, and I have ideas how they should work on the surface. But it will be slower, and won't have any useful software written for it, also you won't be able to use internet or your GPU. (To be fair several years ago I tried the HURD distribution ArchHurd. I just installed on it on my laptop, and by luck internet just worked, and had a firefox running so it was good.)
- bmacho 3y ago
  edit: probably I did not even install it, but it was a live system.
phrenicfraud 3y ago
And then replies slowly devolve into arguing about irrelevant things that were solved with the existence of Linux because plan9 sucks and Linux is just a kernel which is actually used by people and therefore they actually found ways to solve problems they were most annoyed by. All these "X is poor man's Y" are a cope. Plan9 is poor man's <insert any operating system that is supposedly inferior to Plan9> because noone uses it. I'm sure on most people the irony of this statement will be lost, so I'm gonna explain: yeah, plan9 is better on paper, too bad we live in glass world.
- SubjectToChange 3y ago
  Plan9 is the perfection of a dead end.
miga 3y ago
Article mentions that Plan9 missed `cgroups`, QoS. Linux moves towards massive process sharing, and thus various of sharing controls are key to the future that is missing from 90s operating systems. Just enable sound, run your browser and music app, and count number of processes living with `ps ef|wc -l`. I see 282 kernel threads, and 536 total processes. You will see that we live in the future, because of extensive modularization of system services, and cannot get back without sacrificing reliability and comfort.
- lproven 3y ago
  It doesn't need cgroups or containers, because every process has its own namespace, its own view of the network-global filesystem, so everything is in a container by default. It doesn't need a microkernel, because the concept of microkernels is to split a big monolithic kernel into lots of small simple "servers" running in user space, and have them communicate by passing messages over a defined communications protocol, some kind of RPC type thing. It works, and QNX is the existence proof. But it's really hard and it's really inefficient -- of which, the HURD and Minix 3 are the existence proofs. So most of the actual working "microkernel" OSes kludge it by embedding a huge in-kernel "Unix server" that negates the entire microkernel concept but delivers compatibility and performance. Apple macOS and iOS are the existence proof here. (It could be argued that Windows NT 4 and later are also examples.) Plan 9 achieves the same result, without the difficulties, by default by having most things user space processes and communicating via the filesystem. Disclaimer: this is my very rudimentary understanding. I am not an expert on Plan 9 by any means.
  - tytso 3y ago
    Cgroups are a lot more than just "namespaces". It is also the mechanism by which you can constrain how much CPU, Memory, Network Bandwidth, Storage IOPS or Throughput, etc., processes in a particular cgroup or container can use.
    - lproven 3y ago
      That's fair. But I think the core point here is that, as with much of the Plan 9 design, by including a more elegant and powerful abstraction in the core design, the need for a much more powerful and much more complicated abstraction layer on was obviated, if not eliminated.
butterisgood 3y ago
Yeah when you look at REST vs GraphQL and realize it’s all just streams and namespaces plus some conventions - you get the generality of Plan 9 again.

As of someone who discovered Plan 9 far too late to do anything about it: everything is a poor man's Plan 9 something. Everything. All of it. Plan 9 lived in the goddamned future.

klysm 3y ago

Did it live too far in the future for the time?

pjmlp 3y ago
Just as its sucessor, Inferno. Which is what ChromeOS and Android are mostly today, leaving C to the kernel, or tiny special purpose libs, and everything else in a managed language, Limbo.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  And how close is Go to Limbo?
  - afr0ck 3y ago
    If I remember correctly, they have similar concurrency models. They were both written the same author as well, Rob Pike. Edit: fixed a typo
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Quite close, unsafe package and method declaration come from Oberon-2 (thanks Robert Griesemer), everything else is somehow inspired from Limbo. https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/limbo.html https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/limbo.html https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/docs.html https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/docs.html

pcwalton 3y ago

Looking at the Unix to Plan 9 translation [1] gives me a different opinion. To name one egregious example, omitting find(1) in favor of piping du(1) (what is supposed to be a disk usage analyzer) to grep(1) is not an improvement; it's just user-unfriendliness in service of minimalist aesthetics. (Contrary to popular belief, find(1) is not a particularly "bloated" program; Rust's "fd" implementation is under 7,000 lines of code [2], about a third of the size of Lua.) [1]: https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/Unix_to_Plan_9_command_translation/index.html https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/Unix_to_Plan_9_command_translation/... [2]: https://github.com/sharkdp/fd https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

wbl 3y ago
The problem with find is that it tries to put an entire programing language into its arguments.
- pcwalton 3y ago
  I agree with you to some extent, but the solution is fd: change the tool's interface to make simple things easy. Deleting the tool entirely does nobody any favors. As bad as find(1) is for simple stuff, piping du(1) to grep(1) is worse.
  - comex 3y ago
    That's half of the solution. The other half, I'm convinced, will be a tool that makes complex things possible. After all, if I really need some complex filtering, find's primitive logical operators probably wouldn't even be sufficient. To that end, I love how Nushell's leading example on their home page is ls | where size > 10mb | sort-by modified It seems so elegant! Down with strings! …But it's not my life yet, since last time I wanted to try Nushell they didn't have scripting yet, and I have yet to circle back around to it. There's also Elvish and PowerShell and Oil Shell but they all have their own issues.
    - arp242 3y ago
      zsh solves this with globbing qualifiers: ls -t *(Lm+10) "L" for the "file size" qualifier (why "L"? For "less than size", I think – probably because "s" is already used for setuid), "m" for megabytes, "+" for "larger than". You can also add "om" or "Om" to sort by mtime, but ls will reorder it so you need the -t flag (or the -U flag to not sort things). The syntax is not easy, even byzantine, but it's a lot less to type and pretty convenient in interactive shells.
    - maleldil 3y ago
      > Nushell they didn't have scripting yet If you mean you couldn't run batch scripts from a file, they can do that now. There's an example repo with some community scripts. My favourite is how they handle CLI parsing: https://github.com/nushell/nu_scripts/blob/main/sourced/nu_101/flag.nu https://github.com/nushell/nu_scripts/blob/main/sourced/nu_1...

totallywrong 3y ago

Never tried but I remember reading it was very dependent on the mouse. I probably wouldn't like it.

stefncb 3y ago
It is, but for what it's worth using the mouse is much more pleasant than what we're used to ime. It's weird at first, especially with the teleporting thing but it works really well. Also, if you're gonna try it do it either with a proper three-button mouse or with a large-ish and easy to press scroll wheel button. Otherwise it's really frustrating.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Just the idea of context switching from mouse to keyboard is so annoying to me outside of graphic editing. I installed vinium for firefox recently and it has been a game changer.
  - stefncb 3y ago
    That's fair and I share the sentiment to some degree, especially in "regular" systems. In the time period I used plan 9 I quickly got used to it though, and the method of interaction made me a bit slower and much more considerate. I liked it a lot. I still miss it. I'll probably try it again some time.
  - hardware2win 3y ago
    Context switch?? After longer usage you do that without any thinking
    - taeric 3y ago
      Ish. Just changing where you are oriented can impact how some people are thinking. By nature of their orientation. Moving to a mouse primes my brain to start thinking spatially about things. Which is not something I'm typically doing when looking at textual/symbolic things. I can see some value in doing it, of course.

thesuitonym 3y ago

I once saw Plan 9 described as "Imagine if all the stuff they told you about Unix was true." Edit to add: I don't know that this actually makes Plan 9 better, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't make it worse (Although from our perspective in 2023, it's definitely alien and difficult)

nine_k 3y ago

Plan 9 had many improvements over Unix of its times. It opened up too late to conquer the world though. Some good things from it were imported into Solaris and Linux later. Technological progress likes to reinvent itself, looping back to the same idea that did not work last time, and maybe making it a hit finally. Two examples: - Apple Newton, 1992 (a flop) -> Palm Pilot, 1997 (niche success) -> Apple iPhone, 2007 (world domination). - Java Virtual Machine, 1994 (server-side world domination, a flop in the browser) -> Inferno OS, from the makers of Unix and Plan9, 1996 (a flop) -> WASM (prospects of world domination in the browser).

torginus 3y ago
I personally don't like WASM. I think the Native Client (which is more than a decade old today) was a much better technical solution. It used actual cpu native assembly bundled with a verifier, and had actual good integration into low-level platform APIs like graphics, threading, etc. instead of using this weird Javascript bridge approach. Due to it being native code from the start, it also had none of the startup performance issues, that plague WebAssembly. WASI also seems like a wrong approach, considering it inherits the limitations of WASM, like problems with memory, allocation and multithreading and hacks needed to overcome them. VM-s are also kind of a wash for me too, since nowadays the most popular way to run software in a portable/sandboxed manner is Docker, which is NOT cpu-agnostic, even if you ran a JVM app in it, the bundled JVM would be CPU arch dependent.
- nine_k 3y ago
  Actual CPU native assembly? It would need to support x86, x64, and aarch64 by now. (And likely RISC-5 in the near future.) The point of VMs like WASM is not (specifically) performance though, even if performance is desirable. It's the minimal, fixed standard, and the isolation. If you badly need native performance, develop a native application %)
  - vilunov 3y ago
    Or it could get translated to the target ISA by the user-agent Rosetta-style, suffering the same warmup issues, but only on some architectures.

prmoustache 3y ago

But what about security? I haven't really used it but from what I understood at first most of it is very elegant because at the time it was developped all nodes in a network could still be trusted.

tsss 3y ago

The same person who is involved with Plan 9 also made Go. Taking one look at that programming language doesn't leave me very optimistic about Plan 9.

didntcheck 3y ago
Agreed. Go is a shining example of Unix philosophy - but I don't mean that as a compliment. I mean it prioritizes ease of implementation over any other concerns and hence forces the user to reinvent many wheels. Forces round things into square holes, regardless of if that interface actually makes sense. And either completely ignores good ideas from other camps or goes sour grapes and claims they're overcomplicated and bad (then quietly tries to hack them on later) Worse is better than nothing, but when better has been demonstrated to exist, worse is just worse
- phrenicfraud 3y ago
  I remember trying to figure out what's up with Go and left in complete disbelief when I was told that I need to install nginx on my local machine and fake a DNS entry just for go's package manager to "fetch" my local package from my local machine just so I could mess around with it how that works. All because I couldn't care less about 3rd party services like github.
  - bufio 3y ago
    User error.
  - lagniappe 3y ago
    you're holding it wrong
  - rakoo 3y ago
    That's never been and still isn't mandatory
rhabarba 3y ago
> The same person Go was designed by: - Robert Griesemer, known for nothing else, - Rob Pike, primarily known for sam(1), acme(1) and several other Plan 9 tools, the Blit (Unix's own graphical terminal), UTF-8 (with Ken Thompson), Inferno and Limbo, - and Ken Thompson, ancient god.

bmacho 3y ago

Can't everyone design a better OS than the current operating systems? More features, easier to use as a user, safer, easier to write programs for it, less bugs, more compatibility, etc. I am using operating systems for years, and I have ideas how they should work on the surface. But it will be slower, and won't have any useful software written for it, also you won't be able to use internet or your GPU. (To be fair several years ago I tried the HURD distribution ArchHurd. I just installed on it on my laptop, and by luck internet just worked, and had a firefox running so it was good.)

bmacho 3y ago
edit: probably I did not even install it, but it was a live system.

phrenicfraud 3y ago

And then replies slowly devolve into arguing about irrelevant things that were solved with the existence of Linux because plan9 sucks and Linux is just a kernel which is actually used by people and therefore they actually found ways to solve problems they were most annoyed by. All these "X is poor man's Y" are a cope. Plan9 is poor man's <insert any operating system that is supposedly inferior to Plan9> because noone uses it. I'm sure on most people the irony of this statement will be lost, so I'm gonna explain: yeah, plan9 is better on paper, too bad we live in glass world.

SubjectToChange 3y ago
Plan9 is the perfection of a dead end.

miga 3y ago

Article mentions that Plan9 missed `cgroups`, QoS. Linux moves towards massive process sharing, and thus various of sharing controls are key to the future that is missing from 90s operating systems. Just enable sound, run your browser and music app, and count number of processes living with `ps ef|wc -l`. I see 282 kernel threads, and 536 total processes. You will see that we live in the future, because of extensive modularization of system services, and cannot get back without sacrificing reliability and comfort.

lproven 3y ago
It doesn't need cgroups or containers, because every process has its own namespace, its own view of the network-global filesystem, so everything is in a container by default. It doesn't need a microkernel, because the concept of microkernels is to split a big monolithic kernel into lots of small simple "servers" running in user space, and have them communicate by passing messages over a defined communications protocol, some kind of RPC type thing. It works, and QNX is the existence proof. But it's really hard and it's really inefficient -- of which, the HURD and Minix 3 are the existence proofs. So most of the actual working "microkernel" OSes kludge it by embedding a huge in-kernel "Unix server" that negates the entire microkernel concept but delivers compatibility and performance. Apple macOS and iOS are the existence proof here. (It could be argued that Windows NT 4 and later are also examples.) Plan 9 achieves the same result, without the difficulties, by default by having most things user space processes and communicating via the filesystem. Disclaimer: this is my very rudimentary understanding. I am not an expert on Plan 9 by any means.
- tytso 3y ago
  Cgroups are a lot more than just "namespaces". It is also the mechanism by which you can constrain how much CPU, Memory, Network Bandwidth, Storage IOPS or Throughput, etc., processes in a particular cgroup or container can use.
  - lproven 3y ago
    That's fair. But I think the core point here is that, as with much of the Plan 9 design, by including a more elegant and powerful abstraction in the core design, the need for a much more powerful and much more complicated abstraction layer on was obviated, if not eliminated.

butterisgood 3y ago

Yeah when you look at REST vs GraphQL and realize it’s all just streams and namespaces plus some conventions - you get the generality of Plan 9 again.