On Feb 1, 2011 1:05 AM, <smiley@zenzebra.mv.com> wrote:
> Reading about Plan 9, I was quite excited to install it.  I was quite
> excited when I first booted and ran it, too.  But I distinctly felt my
> heart sink a little the first time it hung.  Since then, I've browsed
> some of the OS source code and, having done that, I came to understand
> why the system was so buggy.  The core applications appear to be written
> in a style of C programming reminiscent of the dawn of UNIX.  While the
> operating system architecture is BEAUTIFULLY designed (with the
> exception, perhaps of that fossil/conf gotcha!), the C code used to
> implement it doesn't seem to take advantage of any of the programming
> paradigms that have emerged in the intervening 30 years...
>
What hasn't plan 9 adopted that would make it a better system? OOP? Plan 9 adopted (afaik) things like concurrency before other mainstream systems. Plan 9's namespaces are still unique to the system, and the way most things are represented as a fileserver is something very unique to plan 9/inferno. What programming paradigms do you think plan 9 shoul
take advantage of?
> Getting Plan 9 code to crash is almost too easy:
>
> term% mkdir trashdir && cd trashdir && mkdir x
> term% touch `{i=0; while (test $i -lt 128) { echo -n abcdefghijklmnop; i=`{echo $i+1|hoc} } }
> term% cp abc* abc* x
> # watch the cp executable suicide
> # now, make SURE there's nothing in this rio window that you want to keep...
> term% rm abc*
> # watch the rio window go bye bye!
>
Yes, plan 9's file name length can be a bit 'short' in some cases. The example you gave is a bit extreme, as fgb showed. When and why would you need a filename/path that long?