From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <85bdcd8554551ec025aaeebef2e83904@mightycheese.com> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] GCC3.0 [Was; Webbrowser] From: "rob pike, esq." In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2003 08:31:04 -0800 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 51a2e2c8-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 Plan 9 was really not designed with performance in mind. It was designed to push some Unix ideas in new directions, to build an operating system with networking at its core instead of an add-on bag, to design a system interface that would make window systems easy to write, and to be clean code. I think it's that last point that might make you think Plan 9 was designed for speed. Execute less code, run faster. But to get those 10% tweaks everybody fusses over, to the detriment of just about everything in computing, you need to tune and tune and fuss and tweak and hack, and that does not leave you with clean code. Plan 9 is fundamentally efficient in the sense that its interfaces are clean and the code is modest in scope, but it will not win most performance races that depend on benchmarks. On the other hand, the kernel compiles in a few seconds on a modest modern computer. The entire tree - everything - builds in a few minutes (and by far the largest piece of that time is compiling applications written outside an imported, such as gs). Now that is performance I care about. -rob