4 ms·

Yes, thank you for mentioning Plan9, it's a wonderful example of the limits on current OS research. The arguments you give are spot on, I would only add the ne

Yes, thank you for mentioning Plan9, it's a wonderful example of the limits on current OS research. The arguments you give are spot on, I would only add the need for backwards compatibility, or at least the possibility of maintaining the huge and ever increasing volume of mission-critical systems running Unix (Banking systems, the financial world, the Internet, ...). However, while it's true that Plan9 failed to catch on, a lot of its ideas have been backported to Unix (/proc anyone?). I think that there's something there. Unix can be improved. But no one is going to look at your improvements if it breaks their existing systems.

zackelan 13y ago
To put it another way - any potential future competitor to UNIX will have to include UNIX, via a POSIX compatibility layer. But that won't be enough, because of all the extensions to POSIX. So you really need a Linux compatibility layer (which we see that FreeBSD, for example, already has). So, if you want to make a better UNIX, no matter how good your idea is - you have to implement Linux as well, in addition to all your great ideas. At that point, maybe your time would be better spent working on Linux directly.