Re: [9fans] gcc on plan9

[Paul Lalonde <plalonde@telus.net>]

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On 7-Jun-06, at 4:17 PM, Corey wrote:
>
> I've more or less dimly grokked the not-immediately-obvious-but- 
> very-elegant
> Plan9-as-object-oriented-via-9p concept; but Plan 9 is not a  
> programming
> language.

Agreed - It's more like the CORBA part rather than the language part,  
although much nicer/more uniform.
That said, language bindings to services should be simple to write,  
not the hideous mess we see in the CORBA and COM world.  Sadly, C++  
makes for a hideous mess of these models.
File abstractions wind up being pretty easy and relatively clean.

>
> To which I'll probably get the response from someone: "OOP is  
> pointless -
> you can do every thing OOP can do, using 9p and modular programming in
> C."

OOP isn't pointless - but most supposed OOP code is just a poor  
excuse not to understand your flow control.  My annoyance is that the  
cult of re-use that is associated with most OOP proselytization makes  
the code bloat hugely - I'm as guilty of that as the next guy.   
Compare the STL hash implementation with the the elf hash table  
implementation - the latter works in 20 lines of code, the former  
requires 769 lines of near-opaque code.  Sure, it extends to any  
object you have, but the development cost was huge.  It's good to  
have it, but then people mimic that style with substantially less re- 
usable constructs that aren't nearly as functionally stable as  
hash_map and hash_set.

>
> Which is certainly a valid point, unless for whatever reasons, you  
> are unable
> to write a whole framework or whatever from scratch, and would thus  
> selfishly
> prefer to use an existing one.

Now that's a separate issue, although still touching on re-use.  For  
that one I question the viability of *any* open source "desktop"  
environment and most closed ones too.  The cruftiness that is so- 
called required to satisfy naive users is dead in the way of  
usability for advanced users.  It's sad we've all decided that  
computers have to be easy-to-use, by which is usually meant "require  
little or no training".  Sadly, a little training can go a long way  
to make usability happen for expert users, which is a level most  
users wind up a in a few years: for evidence, see how many windows  
users are willing to muck deep in their menus to change interface  
options.  Perhaps not for their early exposure, but soon enough after  
everyone seems to.  Yuck.

>
> I don't like C++ either;  I'm merely asking about Objective-C,  
> which I find
> enjoyable and mostly sound.

I like it much better than C++, that's for sure.  I'm still not so  
sure about bastard hybrids though :-)

>
>> I can easily imagine a nice smalltalk implementation for Plan 9 that
>> plays well with the 9P servers.
>
> Yes, that would be cool.
>
> But when I mention:  "I can easily imagine a nice <insert  
> programming language>
> implementation for Plan 9 that plays well with the 9P servers", I  
> somehow quickly
> make an annoyance of myself.  <grin>  It's weird.

:-)  I think the key part is that people don't want to see the layers  
and layers of cruft that seem to be involved in any port from the  
linux (GCC) world these days.  Even python is so corrupted by that  
environment I want to scream (I had to port it to PS3 recently, and  
at least the dev kit uses GCC, but even then the platform  
dependencies are hellish to work with).

But mostly I've been finding that rc + awk + sed does most of my 9p  
coding, with surprisingly good results.

Paul

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