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by fao_
1881 days ago
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> Plan 9 as a 'living system' could have re-evaluated some of the architectural decisions that were made in the late 80s and early 90s as practically every detail of hardware, software and networking changed But that's exactly what it did. And that's exactly the reason you're claiming for it's failure. What it seems like to me, is that you're trying to have your cake and eat it here. You're saying, on the one hand, that you like Plan9 because of what sets it apart from contemporary and modern systems. Then you're saying that you dislike the distance that it had from those systems because you wish it could have had better interoperability. Do you see how this is inherently contradictory, though? You quite literally cannot have the changes that Plan9 had, and have better interoperability, because those changes were made on a base that is fundamentally conflicting. It sounds like what you wish they had written UNIX System 8, with Plan 9 Addons™ |
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Main line Plan 9 never went through any real iterations - by 1996, attention was elsewhere, and all of the original designers went off to other things.
If the original designers had still been working on it, they may well have reworked a number of those decisions with the rise of fast and cheap local CPU and storage, 3D acceleration, etc.
I dislike the gratuitous incompatibility of Plan 9. The features that made Plan 9 good have nothing to do with having a weirdo variant C and no working C++ compiler. They broke all sorts of compatibility for no particularly valid reason. As such, they built a system that couldn't run 99% of programs written by people sitting outside the Unix Room.
If they hadn't been so stubborn about this Plan 9 might well be where Linux is - or at least, one of the livelier BSDs.
It's one thing to have original ideas in the OS. I suspect if you hew too close to Linux in an attempt to pick up device drivers, user space programs "entire" (e.g. system call compatibility), you wind up building... Linux. But not being able to run a large pool of programs is laughable. It makes for Bad Research not to mention a really crappy Daily Driver: something that requires amazing levels of Stockholm Syndrome to claim is workable as a regular use OS.