Re: [9fans] Go and 21-bit runes (and a bit of Go status)

[Jeff Sickel <jas@corpus-callosum.com>]

Contributions would be great, but we’re swimming upstream to spawn and die.

The libbio changes are a good example.  More than a month before the release
candidates started rolling out there was one patch (https://codereview.appspot.com/14604047/)
to try and reconcile the changes.  I also added a patch that let us keep our
version of libbio (https://codereview.appspot.com/15750047/) and still pick
up the required four new functions that happen to be replicated elsewhere.
Neither patch is ideal, and neither has made progress in getting rolled into
the release.

It takes time, more than effort, to keep up with the various Go developer
lists where changes actually take place.  The case of libbio changes happened
at a time when no one in the Plan 9 community was really looking at the
threads until it was too late to comment.  Now we’re caught trying to
keep up again.  So either we start posting codereview emails to the 9fans
list, or we find a better way to collaborate and make Plan 9 a first tier
target for Go.



On Dec 2, 2013, at 10:10 AM, Skip Tavakkolian <skip.tavakkolian@gmail.com> wrote:

> It would be very hard to replicate what Go can do for Plan 9 with something else.  There is a large and growing collection of packages that make it possible to deal with the dizzying number of protocols and APIs that are today's WWW.  Another advantage of Go is that, like Limbo, it enables the young enthusiastic 9fans to contribute meaningful work in a shorter time that would otherwise be required (e.g. mastering C, etc.). I think, in the long run, the pain of the teething problems are worth the effort.
> 
> This current situation is not insurmountable;  it seems that we have enough people who are interested and a handful who are contributors that we can make this happen with some coordination.