From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Ronald G. Minnich" To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] GCC3.0 [Was; Webbrowser] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2003 08:15:25 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 50ebedde-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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