[9fans] Rant (was Re: Plan9 and Ada95?)

[Lucio De Re <lucio@proxima.alt.za>]

I'm not inviting flames, here, I'm just voicing an opinion no one else
seems to share :-(

On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 12:54:15PM -0500, David Gordon Hogan wrote:
>
> It's not.  If anything, it's worse.

That's cheap.  Much as I can easily agree that GNU bloat can be
improved on, I don't see anyone getting it right.

Maybe the approach is flawed, but the results are out there.  Unlike
Plan 9's ?c, GCC has to deal not only with different architectures,
but also different operating systems.

The above comment is a symptom of a Plan 9 syndrome I, for one, am
not proud of: "we didn't contribute to it, it can't be any good".

In the meantime, if I want to cross-develop for Windows or Linux,
or any other established platforms, Plan 9 is just no use to me,
while GCC and its offspring are.  I know what my choice would be,
but it's no choice, is it?  Oh, I forget the Inferno tools, those
are extremely useful, but they just don't reach far enough,
unfortunately.  I think that is a good direction, but still falls
short of present developers' needs.

Russ considered using ?c to produce Linux executables, but how much
work is involved?  OK, so dynamic libraries are a bad idea, but
even producing static binaries is near as damn out of the question.

Then forsyth mentions in passing he resorted to redefining thread
code for FreeBSD because Posix threads wouldn't cut it, so why is
the new design not submitted for inclusion in *BSD code?

Let's get off the hobbyhorse of criticising all the alternative
platforms and actually co-operate with them or show that the Plan
9 way is as superior as we make it out to be.

Sorry for the rant, I really don't mean it in a personal fashion,
but I also fail to see the benefit of just criticising without
providing any suggestions on _how_ to improve the things that are
being criticised.  Like, you can't exactly remove GCC from today's
development environment, what will you put in its place?  Across
the board?

++L