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by zzzcpan
3399 days ago
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Plan 9 had fundamental technical problems too. Like most of the systems of that time it was designed with small single-building kind of networks in mind and didn't offer any value once large planet scale networks came to life. Also everything could have being implemented on top of any unix system, but wasn't that interesting for anyone to bother. |
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In any case, Plan 9 is still ahead on quite a few fronts, with federated authentication that is simple(-ish) and works, a versioned filesystem by default, a unified namespace (the new interpretation of "filesystem") to access any resource you might want to use (instead of, today: DNS + TCP ports + HTTP URL's), and security by only exposing the necessary resources to processes, instead of exposing everything and then making up contrived access restriction schemes on top. (Smells of capabilities by Pike's own admission, I believe). That last part was mostly thanks to namespaces which Linux has picked up and popularised in a simple form with Docker... after 20+ years.
The important bits of the new architecture were also about the parts that were left out. No disk usage utility, based on the rapidly decreasing price of a giga bytes. Go and try to make contemporary sysadmins, who still partition their drives to this day, accept this highly distruptive simplification. Gotta create ourselves our busywork!
In the end, Plan 9 was made by /educated/ people with /resources/, and much of today's software isn't. No surprise it's better made.
(edit: some structure added to my rambling.)