(King Lear, First Servant)

I think it's a mistake to split into factions. The collective is small enough that it's almost like the joke about someone

being so fractious that if they were in a room by themselves, they'd argue with themselves for practice.

I mainly run a 9 version that's several years old, give or take some Raspberry Pi HAT devices, just because I've had to

earn my keep doing non-Plan 9 work for nearly 8 years and that Other contracting has consumed enough time I haven't got much spare time.

 Ada, C++, C#. (Good things too: I suddenly got to develop single page applications in JavaScript with Vue.js and I quite liked both of those and

immediately rewrote from C# to Go.)

Last iwp9 in Waterloo last year, I was finally able to interact after many years with both 9legacy and 9front people.

During the summer, I attended a 9front hackathon in Brooklyn, where by circumstance I wasn't at all useful in the hackathon part,

for various reasons irrelevant here, one of them being an unexpected transit time between Brooklyn and Midtown,

but I did have a chance to interact for the first time with a large group of 9front people.

Whatever it might have been when 9front kicked off, it now has a structure, a technical competence, a real interest in 9 ideas,

and lots of people discussing things and beavering away (more than I was).

I've imported 9front code both into the compilers and the kernels, for instance for embedded wifi support.

It's sometimes not easy on the app and kernel side because there has been big divergence, but then again, the chief benefit of trade is difference,

so perhaps it's not a bad thing.