From: Russ Cox <russcox@gmail.com>
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] alef post mortem?
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 16:58:47 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <ee9e417a04092313584100b89e@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.4.58.0409231010150.23430@malasada.lava.net>
> When was the decision made to remove alef from use? What were the
> factors? What worked well about alef, and where was it lacking?
> Was there ever a retrospective paper written analyzing what
> was learned and why it was abandonned?
This has come up on the list before. Alef was abandoned largely
because no one had time to maintain it. When Alef and C were both
around, many libraries had to be kept up in two different forms.
Alef was a success in that it made it easy for Rob and others to
experiment with writing threaded programs in a language with
great notation. Libthread was written to provide the Alef features
but in C (losing the great notation, sadly, but keeping the concepts
like channels and coroutines executing inside operating system
processes).
Rob had just converted everything when I started to do serious
Plan 9 development (libdraw, which thankfully didn't have to be
written in both languages).
Speaking only for myself, I learned that good languages cannot
survive if they can't link directly (or with almost no effort) with C code
written oblivious to the language's existence. On the other hand,
crappy but C-compatible languages (like C++) or libraries (like pthreads)
will endure forever. I've spent the last few days fighting the giant
mess that is pthreads, so I'm possibly a little bitter.
As I said, this has come up before. The archives may well have better
answers from more authoritative sources.
Russ
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2004-09-23 20:58 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 34+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2004-09-06 19:43 [9fans] 3D glenda competition andrey mirtchovski
2004-09-07 14:17 ` Ronald G. Minnich
2004-09-16 17:01 ` Dave Lukes
2004-09-16 22:57 ` Jack Johnson
2004-09-22 21:53 ` n2 deep
2004-09-23 13:09 ` Jason Gurtz
2004-09-23 20:13 ` [9fans] alef post mortem? Tim Newsham
2004-09-23 20:58 ` Russ Cox [this message]
2004-09-24 1:00 ` Kenji Okamoto
2004-09-24 5:24 ` Martin C.Atkins
2004-09-24 5:39 ` Kenji Okamoto
2004-09-24 1:13 ` andrey mirtchovski
2004-09-24 19:16 ` [9fans] grid computing -- high performance? Tim Newsham
2004-09-24 19:25 ` Ronald G. Minnich
2004-09-24 19:45 ` Tim Newsham
2004-09-24 20:39 ` Ronald G. Minnich
2004-09-24 21:38 ` geoff
2004-09-25 2:54 ` boyd, rounin
2004-09-25 5:56 ` Bruce Ellis
2004-09-25 14:01 ` andrey mirtchovski
2004-09-24 19:32 ` Eric Van Hensbergen
2004-09-24 19:47 ` rog
2004-09-24 19:35 ` Christian Grothaus
2004-09-24 22:14 ` andrey mirtchovski
2004-09-24 20:23 ` jmk
2004-09-24 21:39 ` Tim Newsham
2004-09-24 22:14 ` jmk
2004-09-24 22:13 ` andrey mirtchovski
2004-09-24 22:52 ` Ronald G. Minnich
2004-09-24 23:11 ` geoff
2004-09-27 13:51 ` Ronald G. Minnich
2004-09-27 18:45 ` geoff
2004-09-27 18:59 ` boyd, rounin
2004-09-25 2:47 ` boyd, rounin
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=ee9e417a04092313584100b89e@mail.gmail.com \
--to=russcox@gmail.com \
--cc=9fans@cse.psu.edu \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).