[9fans] purpose of APE

["Howard Trickey" <howard@research.bell-labs.com>]

It is interesting to me that the "purpose of APE" has become to allow
compiling legacy and external programs.  When Andrew Hume and I made APE
originally, the purpose was different.  It was a time when some of the
researchers in our center were actively maintaining Research Unix, while
others were doing Plan 9, and many of us had reasons to work on both
systems.  APE was a viewed as a way of writing the programs we cared about
so that they could be compiled with no change on all of the systems in our
center.  Now clearly, APE on Unix was easy to do and a first class way of
writing programs, while on Plan 9, the mapping is sometimes a bit tortured
(especially signals, select(), and some of the permission stuff), so APE on
Plan 9 is a hack, but it did serve its purpose.

I agree that the current use of APE is indeed to compile legacy and external
programs. But if that were the original goal, it would have been different:
there would have been a more kitchen-sink-union-all-the-Unixes feel to it
(ugly, ugly) so that monstrosities like autoconf would work (and it would
have infected Plan 9 --- especially the system directory conventions ---
more than any of us would have liked).

- Howard Trickey
howard@research.bell-labs.com