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by SixSigma
3427 days ago
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Us - yes I am part of the plan9 community - though somewhat inactive at the moment - I'm doing a degree in Supply Chain Management so my focus is on that. That's all well porting a plan9 to JS but it's the kernel services that make plan9 different. "Everything is a file" is the core concept. The rest is just things built on top of that. We have a boot CD, it boots in Qemu, we have an emulated environment that runs on on Linux/BSD in 9vx, we have mounting 9p in the Linux kernel, we have plan9ports in Linux/BSD. If you want plan9 it's not hard to get! |
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I agree that the kernel services are what make Plan 9 different. I think the "everything is a file" concept is something that has not been explored nearly as much as it could be.
Thanks for mentioning 9vx, I completely forgot about that project! Just downloaded it and fired it up (managed to figure out the correct invocation without needing the (nonexistent) manual :P). That would be a really interesting port to JS.
I agree that Plan9 is not at all hard to get at - but if you can run it just by visiting a website, a LOT more people will play with it. Even if they just fire it up, go "huh, neat" (or more likely "how on earth do I use it") and close it, that does increase platform exposure.
I can't help but remember all the DOS games that are directly playable on the Web Archive. Inferno used to run in-browser because it's the perfect tech demo of the platform. Plan 9 should be able to too IMHO.
At this point in time Web browsers are not the perfect environment for general-purpose x86 emulation, I can't argue that. If things were different we'd run everything inside the browser. But I think Plan9 is sufficiently resource-light, fast, and cleanly-designed enough that it would make an excellent candidate.