From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
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To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: Building GCC
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:51:00 +0200
From: lucio@proxima.alt.za
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> /n/sources/contrib/fgb/mp3dec.tgz

No one can deny that your contributions have been invaluable.

I do think there's purists and there's pragmatists (sic to both
there's :-) But there's also whingers and armchair critics who haven't
yet figured out that some things are hard to do.  Maybe we ought to
dedicate wiki space to things no one is willing to tackle.

What would make all the difference would be a valuable application
that is totally dependent on one or more Plan 9 features (private
namespaces, plumbing, distributed processing, etc.).  But until we
extend the field of applications, it is almost impossible and
certainly very unlikely that the next spreadsheet-like idea is going
to be based on Plan 9.

At the same time, porting pseudo-Posix applications to Plan 9 reduces
the pressure to produce Plan 9 native code.  In my opinion, that
defeats the objective of making Plan 9 or its descendants the platform
of the future.

Then again, Linux's first IP networking was a port of KA9Q.  It
sufficed to give impetus to the implementation of a kernel IP stack.
One can't really fault that logic either.

++L