From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Wed, 7 Jun 2006 21:07:05 -0700 From: Roman Shaposhnik Subject: Re: [9fans] gcc on plan9 In-reply-to: <44879EC5.3050105@lanl.gov> To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Message-id: <4487A269.40906@sun.com> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT References: <44879B05.6050706@lanl.gov> <44879EC5.3050105@lanl.gov> User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 (X11/20060420) Topicbox-Message-UUID: 6025bca2-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 Ronald G Minnich wrote: > so, end of this thread, we hope. Well, I've writing a reply to your earlier email in a separate window, but except that one (and one question which I'm saving for the end of this email) I think we've had enough. The discussion helped me understand where you guys are coming from and why gcc is just a means to an end for you. One question that I still have, though, is what makes you think that once you're done with porting gcc (big task) and porting HPC apps to gcc/Plan9 (even bigger one!) they will *execute* faster than they do on Linux ? Or is the ease of building clusters (along the lines of what you've presented at SuperComputing in Seattle) alone worth the trouble. Please help me understand (and feel free to change the subject ;-)). > linux nowadays is all about building a windows desktop. BORING. Or a > Mac OSX ripoff desktop. BORING. And just look at all that great vista > stuff. oh boy, I can slant my windows or something. Who the F*** cares? Unwashed masses, perhaps ? ;-) > What if you had a window manager that could be recursive? that would > set it up so you can name windows by a path name? that would let you > treat the recursive desktops -- to any level -- as just another > window? that would trivially allow you to connect mouse clicks in a > window to control actions for one or more other windows (i.e. you > could logically group windows and then control all of them via mouse > clicks)? That would maybe let you easily connect output from a process > in one window to another? that would let you build little widgets > that could easily control other windows? That would let you display > all window state in another window? That would let you set, say, all > windows with a browser with the label abaco-### (### a number), with a > simple text command; and let you find all windows with the label > abaco.* with, in the limit, a grep? That would make it easy to group > all windows with the label 'abaco.*' so that you could say 'hide all > abaco' with a simple script? > > Wouldn't that be neat? I mean, that's a real bitch in X, right? > > Except ... you already have it. You're absolutely onto something here, Ron! In fact, if everything goes right, I really want to explore a possibility of building a clean desktop (don't laugh yet!) on top of Plan9. I really think that what Nemo has been doing with building UIs is quite convincing and has lots of potential. But I have to start at even lower level, making "/dev/draw" do all the basic things I care about in a desktop. Will see where it goes, but one thing for sure -- I'll be asking lots of questions in this forum ;-) Thanks, Roman.