[p_l]

Plan9's dial is derived from OSI approach of separating service and protocol (aka implementation), with name service as first-party component (BSD Sockets have it stapled over and it hurts).

The example with calling kremvax over datakit specifically goes to show-off that all that specifies datakit usage is the "dk" string - nothing else.

Similarly with XTI (and other OSI-oriented network APIs), what you are telling OS is "I want to have a stream oriented connection with graceful close, to service Y on host X", and you don't have to care at all whether it will be IPv4, IPv6, TUBA, CLNS over Ethernet, or direct serial modem exchange using HDLC.

Go doesn't have all of that flexibility because it works from userspace, but it reuses the "service, not implementation detail" approach and lets you concentrate on human-readable domain names and service names instead of providing a maze of "hardcoded IP" issues.