[9fans] Why not APE?

[baldwin@vitanuova.com]

Russ has it dead on: Plan 9 isn't attempting to be compatible with
"Standard C" and has no previous usage to be worried about.  It's
trying to come up with a clean system -- keeping old baggage around
is *not* the way to do that.  And what would be the point of the
old baggage?  Does anybody really believe that native Plan 9 would
be able to compile and run off-the-shelf Unixoid programs?  To do
that would require major damage to Plan 9.

The APE solution seems to work just fine: if you want "int main()"
and stdio and signals and tcgetattr and sockets and all that other,
err, junk, well go right ahead and use APE.  It seems to work as
well as can be expected (don't blame APE for autoconfig hell).
For heaven's sake, even X11 was compiled under it.

Now this may be a little weird, but I for one use the Inferno C libraries
to compile Plan 9 programs on Unixoid boxes.  They are sort of an inverse-APE.
They don't intend to be a complete implementation of the Plan 9 C libraries,
but they do well enough that my sundry Plan 9 programs compile and run on,
say, Solaris (like the mk and C compiler tools of Inferno do).  And I don't
have to de-Plan 9 them.

I am quite happy that the baggage of the past can be left to the side
and not intertwine itself with Plan 9 and constrain it.  If I wanted a
system that could compile and run all the "lovely" Unix programs out
there, well I'd go get FreeBSD or something.