From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2006 23:05:12 -0400 From: Dan Cross To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] quantity vs. quality Message-ID: <20060608030512.GE13116@augusta.math.psu.edu> References: <4ef97ffa3f0bbb8004fb870726536e2c@collyer.net> <50097123-1D9F-400C-BABA-3F9A4B352733@orthanc.ca> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <50097123-1D9F-400C-BABA-3F9A4B352733@orthanc.ca> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i Topicbox-Message-UUID: 600766ee-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Wed, Jun 07, 2006 at 06:39:42PM -0700, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote: > Plan 9's "future" is in guiding the UNIX community forward, not in > regressing back to what spawned it in the first place. And I > sincerely hope that doesn't happen by having Plan 9 be adopted > wholesale by the masses, for that would (sooner or later) see the end > of research and innovation for the sake of not breaking all the > currently running apps, which is what caused UNIX to start growing > mold. I would much rather see Plan 9 stay small and mostly ignored, > since that's how it will remain agile and pliable. It's the *ideas* > from Plan 9 (e.g. the servers, namespaces) that will help the masses > morph their current environment into something suitable for the 21st > century. I concur. One has to ask the question, *why* does one want to attract new users to Plan 9? It would take many man-centuries of effort to get an environment as rich (for the end-user) as that provided by the mainstream Unices right now. And what would be the point? As many have noted, it would lead to increased complexity, bloat, and decreased quality on what is otherwise a pretty clean and high quality system. Plan 9 would, at that point, cease to be Plan 9 and turn into something else. I don't particularly want that, just as I don't really want to add a lot of new ``features'' to C: if I want C++, Java, C#, or Ruby, I know where to get them. Similarly, if I want Unix, I know where to get it. Instead, I'd like to go back to basics and use Plan 9 as a clean, conceptually pure prototype for a new Unix-like system. Let's take the good ideas from Plan 9, and a current BSD kernel (probably the FreeBSD one), a current Unix user-land, an axe, and go to town like Charles did with SunOS 4 back in the day. For that matter, throw in some of the good ideas from VSTa (now FMI/OS? They seem to be regressing: from their Wiki's page on `Current Work': ``working on getting switching to posix style error numbers instead of strings. done'' Great...), EMAS, TOPS-20, VMS, Multics, QNX, etc. (Yes! VMS had some good ideas! Like a standardized calling convention that made it possible to call modules from any number of languages! 20 years ago! Stick THAT in your ELF and smoke it!) But in general, you know, look back at history and add in some of those things that were good ideas and got lost in the sands of time but which will get reinvented two years from now, badly, because no one thinks to do any research before starting on their work anymore. At least, not in computer science.... Of course, that will never happen, and Geoff is right: it's mostly an issue with education and defeating incorrect or outdated perceptions (I get physically ill when I hear about ``efficiency'' these days. Yeah, like your GCC extension to pack struct's is *so* much more efficient on a 3 GHz machine than code to pack it or unpack it from a bytestream. You spend more time porting it to a new platform than you ever did writing and debugging once, and running an arbitrary number of times, the byte packing code). Too bad the example a beginning programmer sees now is the cess pool of open source cruft instead of well-written code. - Dan C.