from Hacker News

Bell Labs' Plan 9 research project looks to tomorrow (1990)

by rmbryan on 1/18/22, 6:09 PM with 70 comments

• by stormbrew on 1/18/22, 8:13 PM

  The most frustrating thing to ever happen to the concepts in plan9 is the funhouse mirror distortions of them that have landed in the linux world. They look just enough like plan9 that people think they represent those ideas, and so they have no idea how powerful those ideas can actually be and don't even know that they don't know it.

  We'll never have any of the things it really promised until we give up on POSIX, tbh.

• by twblalock on 1/18/22, 10:12 PM

  One of the best gifts of Plan 9 was static linking: https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/why_static/index.html

  Hard drives are cheap, so space is not an argument anymore, for reasonable uses of disk space. And most uses are reasonable!

  Ah, but you might say, if a shared library is compromised, it's easy to push a fix! But how to you think it got so widely compromised in the first place? Perhaps because it was a widely shared library? Sharing is a double-edged sword.

  The impetus behind the virtual environments for scripting languages, like Python's venv and Ruby's RVM, is isolation from the base system. Untold developer hours have been lost in attempts to run software with different dependencies than the base system. It's a total mess.

  We shouldn't expect an operating system to be a monolith that dictates the dependency versions for all the code that runs on it. Code should be deployed in sandboxes and it should be independent of the base system. When the code is removed, it should be like it was never there.

• by MarkusWandel on 1/18/22, 8:50 PM

  Unix with its "worse is better" simplicity steamrollered vastly more complex operating systems (Multics above all).

  It even steamrollered its own successor. Plan 9 is brilliant, but Unix already served most people's needs so why change.

  Mental game: If they had managed to quickly push the whole thing out as what is now called open source, while Unix was still proprietary, how would the world look now?

• by MomoXenosaga on 1/19/22, 1:20 AM

  And then 1995 happened.

  https://youtu.be/lAkuJXGldrM

• by xvilka on 1/19/22, 6:31 AM

  Rio is unusable in modern world though. They need to adapt or create something new for the touchpad and touchscreen, or keyboard-driven.

• by jakuboboza on 1/19/22, 7:48 AM

  It looks like they were forward thinking and had a solid idea what will happen / be important in future.

• by jiriro on 1/18/22, 10:29 PM

  Is there a showcase of Plan9’s killer features?

  For example there is this mandatory covid testing. So each department is handed an excel file and they log the tests. And there is another excel which summarizes those dept’s ones.

  Can Plan9 be useful in such a situation?