Re: [9fans] Someone made a Wayland compositor based on Rio, Wio

[Lucio De Re <lucio.dere@gmail.com>]

In your defence, Hiro, I quite believe at least some of what you said.
Plan 9 is superior, aesthetically, but not perfect and graphics is no
exception.

Which is unfortunate, because it is also a very difficult field that
attracts mostly those who are prone to take short-cuts and apply
pragmatic solutions and encourages such behaviour even from the most
meticulous of developers.

My own anecdote revolves around font compression. I tried to convert
the tools in the Plan 9 chest (to Go), but I just could not quite pry
that knot loose. I consulted the sources, downloaded the description
of the compression algorithm, you name it. I don't think the
developers intentionally obfuscated the code, I suspect (with
Dijkstra) that the code development lent itself to obfuscation in the
quest for efficiency.

That is a real danger in programming, the real difficulty at the core
of "premature optimisation": the risk is that what gets optimised is
buggy and once reduced to maximal performance, it's the bugs that get
performed maximally and no one can pry them away from the cold
clutches of optimised code.

What this discussion made me think about is something that's been
going through my head a bit of late: given that Plan 9 is so much
simpler than the more popular OSes around, how is it that it does not
outperform them?

Take Skype, for example: I use it exclusively and not exactly
willingly for text conferencing, I hadn't made a voice call in Skype
for years when a recent Skype audio conference turned out not very
successfully.

Now, why isn't there a Plan 9 tool that can beat Skype at at least the
texting portion of its game? Considering how greedy Skype is of
resources, it should not be hard to be (nearly, perhaps even much
more) as comfortable and require fewer resources?

I understand that developers for Plan 9 are few and far between, but
there must be low-hanging fruit out there, or am I also missing some
other really important factor?

On 5/3/19, hiro <23hiro@gmail.com> wrote:
> actually i take that back, no thanks to skip, i meant dan!
>
>


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Lucio De Re
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