Re: [9fans] Curious about the state of Plan 9 / 9front in practice

["qwx via 9fans" <9fans@9fans.net>]

On Wed May 14 23:47:26 +0200 2025, lucas.francesco93@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi all, recently i've decided to make my compsci bachelor capstone
> project about a plan9 tool and I’m curious to know and it would be a
> bit relevant for me: what’s the current state of Plan 9/9front in
> actual practice?  Are there any companies, consultancies, or platforms
> still using it in production or semi-production contexts—either
> internally or commercially? I understand it became a niche system, but
> I wonder if there are efforts where it sees real-world use beyond
> experimentation and the usual stuff we see around here, especially
> since it seems there was/is proprietary versions around.  Also, are
> there specific roadblocks that you feel stand in the way of some niche
> use case that it's nearly viable? I would love to take those into
> consideration while writing my document.
> 
> Thanks,
> Lucas

I don't know of any commercial products based on Plan 9 other than
those already cited, but it is being used in actual practice by a
number of people, some using real hardware, others through virtual
machines and drawterm, to do work beyond hobbyist projects.  In my
case, my PhD project is about developing a tool for genome graph
visualization relevant to biologists and bioinformaticians and was
initially implemented and showcased on 9front before being ported to
Linux and others.  I've heard of other researchers in Europe using it
right now in some capacity for their own projects, if only for
testing.  In my branch of research, many existing popular tools
already work fine on Plan 9 through APE or NPE.  The only thing that
makes Plan 9 impractical for applications is the memory allocator's
implementation (a lot of software just assumes it can allocate huge
buffers, eg. on a cluster) and the lack of a C++ compiler and various
dependencies.  The leap from academia to industry is quite small
especially for non-copyleft projects.  Both startups and the largest
bioinformatics firms use other opensource projects in their products,
often unmodified and as part of large data processing pipelines.  More
broadly, you could draw comparisons between 9front and OpenBSD, which
is a relatively larger and much more well-known project, and you might
quickly realize that outside of ports, the differences in terms of
capabilities aren't particularly large.  For my specific case, OpenBSD
is just as impractical because of performance and compatibility issues
across the board.  Note that as far as I'm concerned, 9front is Plan 9
and vice-versa.

Cheers,
qwx

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