Re: [9fans] Re: Building GCC

[Roman Shaposhnik <rvs@sun.com>]

On Fri, 2008-01-25 at 09:49 -0800, Bakul Shah wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Jan 2008 09:26:56 EST Brantley Coile <brantley@coraid.com>  wrote:
> > Plan 9 is not, and should not in my opinion, be a Linux
> > replacment, Unix replacement, MS Windows replacement, and
> > so on.  If you really want Plan 9 to dominate the world
> > and see all your friends use it every day, invent a killer
> > application for it.  That's the only way you can shove
> > existing systems of their pedestals.
> 
> The zillion dollar question is what app would that be. 

  My totally non-scientific observation is that talking about
"an app" in this context is quite misleading. May be it is just
me, but somehow "an application" has the connotations of a single
instance of code running on a single box. I don't think that is
interesting anymore. What could be interesting is to talk about,
what I would call for the lack of a better term, a utility function.
One such utility function could be pervasive networking. Gazing
into my crystal ball brings visions of Google finally doing to
cell phones what IBM did to personal computers and opening a floodgate
of software for that platform. Sun used to say "the network is the
computer" I still largely believe this to be true, but what is even
more important is that bringing pervasive networking to those ~3 billion
cell phones worldwide could very well be the killer "utility function"
of Plan 9. If not in terms of the code, at least in term of ideas.

My 2 rubles.

Thanks,
Roman.