Re: [9fans] design issues in operating systems

[presotto@closedmind.org]

Anothy stole my thunder.  Plan 9 is also a result of
years of churn.  No original code or interface has
survived though some general principles have.

- name spaces should be subjective
- most objects should live in those name spaces
- simplicity is preferable to bells and whistles

If anything, we regularly go through and rewrite
the kernel and every command if we think something can
be done better.  It is a research system and we're not
very interested in backward compatability and only mildly
in a large user community.  We steal equally from everyone we
can, modulo an NIH attitude that's always hard to shake
in a big corp.

Linus started with an incredibly detailed design that
took years to make usable.  He started with the system,
library, and user interfaces of a well used and mature
system.  That's a hell of a lot more design than we stared
with in Plan 9 and it's remained a lot more immutable
than Plan 9's.

I agree with Linus that you can't design and then
walk away, but then again, I don't know anyone
who would agree with that.  It may just seem that
way because mature systems eventually bog down
under the weight of their own backward compatibility.