Re: [9fans] GCC3.0 [Was; Webbrowser]

["Ronald G. Minnich" <rminnich@lanl.gov>]

On Thu, 6 Feb 2003 okamoto@granite.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp wrote:

> I think the speed is not the main matter of Plan 9, anyway.

My memory is at some point it was. An intro by Honeyman at the '89 Usenix
for a Plan 9 speaker ended with "... and he can't believe how slow X11
is". Gosh, was it even called Plan 9 then? Is my memory wrong? I think it
was starting to be called Plan 9.

Did speed stop being a goal when Plan 9 got slower? Personally, I like
speedy OSes. I do recall an Infocomm in 1996 where a speaker from Bell
Labs (Holmdel) presented numbers showing FreeBSD running 10% faster than
Plan 9 for some TCP measurements. I was surprised, as until that time I
had assumed Plan 9 would be faster. So had the speaker. So had, according
to the speaker, the folks at Murray Hill. Nobody expected FreeBSD to win
that race.

Side note: at some point (late 70s) I think I used just about every OS
that ran on a PDP11 (including the Pascal-based one from Hansen, not the
boy-band, but Per Brinch). For speed, V6 Unix always crushed them all,
including the vendor OSes which were supposed to be so much superior (e.g.
RSX). Speed was one distinguishing feature of Unix, the others being
better design, code, capabilities, and, oh, everything else.

We know Plan 9 has the better design, code, capabilities, etc. It would be
nice at some point to be able to say that speed is a distinguishing
feature of Plan 9. Is it fundamentally impossible?

ron