From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Mon,  8 May 2000 12:09:36 +0000
From: Leo Caves caves@yorvic.york.ac.uk
Subject: [9fans] Plan 9 future (Was: Re: Are the Infernospaces gone?)
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Message-ID: <20000508120936.Im47VZMjUqdgSrdoRsZ5BAHaaBs8_JsvJgkXGczOZnY@z>

for portability to other operating systems, does this imply
that other important libraries, on which most applications
in plan9 rely, have also been ported?

(in another, but related context, acme was rewritten to *nix (as wily),
via a reimplementation of (part of?) the plan9 graphics library)

if other elements of the "environment" of plan9 have been made portable
then this might provide a route for not only the "ideas" of plan9,
but also *actual tools*, to disseminate into the wider community.

I guess key here would be the namespace interface and tools
(because there is already a port of 9p to *nix?).

[ hence my original comment about "9spaces" or some such ]

With these tools, one might have the heart of plan9 (but perhaps not the soul).

Leo

PS:  I mourn Alef.
I did not program with it (only limbo), but bought the rationale
for its existence from the plan9 team.
I'm glad that the thread library to implement the CSP-like concurrency
exists, but other languages features, such as loadable
modules etc will be missed.
As for "syntactic sugar", it is sometimes these elements that make
for the excitement in the new environment (they "feel" different
to make an oblique reference to "Pike's Polemic").
Yes, you can achieve the same through other means, but the clarity,
elegance and transparency may be compromised (dangerous things to say without
seeing the new thread library interface definitions)

Will there be a garbage collector in the (new) plan-9 C-compiler/run-time?
Although, this was not part of Alef, it made (makes) limbo a pleasure.

Russ Cox wrote:
> Concurrent programming is alive as ever,
> but is accomplished via a thread library for
> C that provides most of Alef's functionality
> (procs, tasks, buffered and unbuffered channels).
>
> The benefits are that there need not be
> two copies of each library now, and the programs
> are more easily portable to other architectures
> (there was no Alef compiler for the 68000, for
> instance) as well as other operating systems
> (the thread library has been ported to Linux).

> The drawbacks are you lose type checking
> on channel communication and a little bit of
> syntactic sugar.  They're not particularly
> noticeable in practice.