That's partly due to historical reasons I think. Some of the platforms they intended to run Plan 9 on had very buggy GCC ports. It's also worth noting that that

That's partly due to historical reasons I think. Some of the platforms they intended to run Plan 9 on had very buggy GCC ports. It's also worth noting that that the "native" Plan 9 compilers had some quirks of their own (see http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/compiler http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/compiler ). It was never really intended to be a very familiar Unix environment, and they tried to straighten up a couple of things even in the way software is written. There is a POSIX environment available (the APE) but I don't know much about it, I never really tried it. To be fair, between the "good enough" phenomenon and the licensing problems, it never really took off, which is rather sad.