Re: [9fans] MS Research reinvents Inferno?

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

this isn't really about the kernel, but  i think there are two important
bug-reducers in plan9 that windows and *nix systems don't have:

1. plan9 picks a standard and sticks with it. the best example is character set.
plan9 picks one and implements it. and things just work. gnu grep doesn't
and it has many character-set related bugs. for example, in a utf-8 locale,
it's about 100x slower than in a us-ascii locale.

2. plan9's utf-8/unicode implementation also avoids bugs by not
implementing bidi, character shaping, combining characters or extended planes.
to which most of the code in full unicode implentations is devoted 

- erik

Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com> writes

| 
| > It would be interesting to see a bugs-per-million-lines-of-code
| > statistic for Plan 9 vs other systems.  In my experience, Plan 9's
| > advantage is that it's small and simple enough that the bugs are
| > relatively easy to find and fix.
| 
| I agree.  I started toward figuring that out for Plan 9 by
| putting together the kernel history at http://swtch.com/plan9history.
| Step 2 is understanding every change and categorizing them,
| including whether or not they are bug fixes.  Then one can derive
| many interesting statistics about the bugs.
| 
| I got about a quarter of the way through categorizing
| http://swtch.com/cgi-bin/plan9history.cgi?p=^(pc|port)/.*\.[ch]&v=filelist
| I'm hoping to find a student at MIT to finish the job.
| 
| Russ