From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Anastasopoulos S To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] fortune-worthy In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 12:02:02 +0200 Topicbox-Message-UUID: a73edb50-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 On Tue, 16 Dec 2003, andrey mirtchovski wrote: > this one comes from a heated slashdot discussion someone had with somebody > else: > > "Plan9 is just another Hurd -- a theoretically great OS that > only gets used by a few people. The most it can hope for is that > its best principles are adopted by a real OS." > > just letting you know where you are: andrey > > ps: i'll gladly accept suggestions as to what this OS may be (inferno is > honorably excluded) and promise to summarize it in the Wiki :) > > I think that the main advantage of Plan9 is that it revived OS research which was more or less irrelevant as Rob Pike pointed out. Its design and implementation is very simple and you can try new ideas without having to break the thick wall(COM, CORBA, Heavy APIs, 1G lines of source code...) the other OSes happily provide. Obviously it is not yet ready for prime time. It lacks a web brownser, a better web server, quicktime, C++( I really like it ), GUI, a DBMS etc... The core OS is however designed very well and all these can be integrated very smoothly. I think however that its main design goal---easy distribution of services and resources and the shared environment it presents to the users---has been 'superseded? replaced? ignored?(pick your favorite)' in the real world by the web, and that is another discipline. Nowadays the tendency is to provide web based distributed services and use the brownser as the terminal. I can't say if that is good or bad but this is how business are done today. In a plan9 world we would have a data base server that would serve something like SQL/, we would import it in our name space and then use our toolchain to manipulate it(cat, echo, awk or custom ones). In the other world this is done with mozilla, PHP, MySQL. It is my opinion that until Plan9 decides how to approach the web it will continue to be used only for specialized domains(Question: how plan9 is used as Bell-Labs and for what type of jobs? There isn't much information about its real world usage). An a final note, i completely disagree that is can survive if the other OSes adopt its best features. Because we have one architecture(x86) that means we must have one OS(linux i suppose). Plan9 is another design(better or not you decide) and i would like to see more new OSes or ideas rather than see linux take the world. I think that the main reason plan9 is behind in development is that most members of its community are more interested in the core OS(kernel, venti, fossil) than in applications. The problem is that is very diffucult to build from scratch applications like apache, MySQL, GIMP, OpenGL etc using the native plan9 environment(not ape ports) and then compare the results with the UNIX world but that would be the ultimate crash test. Spyros