From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <939f5cd757bba5f27de5a2727cb08564@proxima.alt.za> References: <201004161658.00902.corey@bitworthy.net> <939f5cd757bba5f27de5a2727cb08564@proxima.alt.za> Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2010 09:09:18 -0800 Message-ID: From: Jack Johnson To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Subject: Re: [9fans] Mars Needs Women (was Re: TeX: hurrah!) Topicbox-Message-UUID: 066a737e-ead6-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 8:29 PM, wrote: > very little new is being created, but rather many old things are being > "improved" upon (regurgitated) in manners that consume more and more > computing cycles and deliver less and less performance. I think this is an important observation. When I saw Rob's presentation on concurrency and message passing in Newsqueak, the meat of the message that stuck in my brain was hey, there are easier ways to do a lot of the stuff we're already doing. When you look at the infrastructure to provide D-Bus vs what D-Bus actually does, there is a huge opportunity cost to implement D-Bus if that infrastructure does not already exist. Conversely, if you wanted to implement its features from scratch on, let's say, a non-UNIXlike system with no GCC port, why on earth would anyone import the infrastructure just for that service? The shared infrastructure of the GCC-bound OSes do provide certain heritage and growth benefits to those systems at certain costs. I think the Plan 9 community is one of the few development communities that questions the costs of suggested growth. It has always struck me a more deliberate act of change rather than an adaptation to change, and the pace that it provides also has its own costs and benefits. Do I like EFL? Absolutely. Are there EFL concepts and techniques that Plan 9 could benefit from? Probably. Do we need to import the infrastructure to import EFL to benefit from that mindshare? Probably not. I'm naively hoping Go will eventually take us to some future middle ground where folks can dabble in a shared sandbox of sanity from both sides of the fence. -Jack