[9fans] 9base ports to unix

["Anselm R. Garbe" <garbeam@gmail.com>]

Hi there,

just wanted to let you know, that I ported following base tools of plan9 to Unix
in a single package, based on Russ' plan9ports:

basename, cal, cat, cleanname, cmp, date, dc, diff, echo, eqn, factor, fmt,
fortune, freq, fsize, grep, idiff, join, ls, mkdir, p, rc, readcons,
rm, sed, seq,
sleep, sort, split, strings, sum, tail, tee, test, time, touch, tr, uniq, wc, xd

All binaries are statically linked (also with the host-OS libraries)
by default. I included libregexp, libbio, libutf and libfmt into lib9
to simplify the build process (the libs are still in separate
directories though, just a question of linking).
All tools don't need mk to be build, because I wrote Makefiles to get
rid of the mk dependency (which would make the package bigger). The
whole package is a tarball with 260kb and can be downloaded here:

http://wmi.modprobe.de/snaps/9base-20050819.tar.gz

(Note, bash-3.0 has about 2,3mb(!!!))

I did so, because for writing rc scripts, which is my favorite
scripting language already, it sucked to be dependent on dynamically
linked bloat binaries from GNU. I measured that a simple sleep call to
the default sleep program of Debian consumes about 2MB memory. Since
sleep might be rarely used, the problem of GNU test still occurs,
which needs the same amount. With times(1) I measured running
equivalent scripts (nearly doing the same) written in bash and rc,
bash using the GNU tools, rc using these 9base tools, and conclude
that rc is about 50 times(!) faster. My suspicion is, that this might
be related to dynamic linking and the overhead on process forks, but
also due to the unnecessary bloat contained in a shell, which has
2,3MB compressed source code.

Before the base port I created a 9rc package, which I already
announced in an earlier stage and which is available separately for
those who are only interested in the original rc (without libregexp
and libbio inclusion to lib9). This package can be downloaded here
(130kb):

http://wmi.modprobe.de/snaps/9rc-20050814.tar.gz

Regards,
--
  Anselm R. Garbe  ><><  www.ebrag.de  ><><  GPG key: 0D73F361