Is there any comparison to be made between Plan 9 and Fuchsia (Google's OS)?
This might be orthogonal but doesn't Go Lang (another Google creation) have roots in Plan 9.
This might be orthogonal but doesn't Go Lang (another Google creation) have roots in Plan 9.
And Inferno/Limbo, which made up for Alef being removed from Plan 9.
Plan 9 has its own low-level graphics and windowing libraries that have never received any porting effort by any of the mainstream browsers. Porting a mainstream browser to Plan 9 is about 50 times more labor than has ever been put into Plan 9 even when Bell Labs was footing the bill (in the early 1990s or earlier).
People put a lot of effort in to Plan 9 (and 9front specifically these days), so I want to point out that this is mostly the fault of these "mainstream" browsers being so complicated. It is actually easier for us to emulate an entire virtual machine and run a linux + chrome setup within it then it would be for us to port all the code over.
I also find it no surprise that Fuchsia is getting some chrome dev time, but I have a hard time of believing that it's due to popularity. Google has little interest in maintaining chrome for other more used systems like the BSD's. Seems like they are only interested as a byproduct of wanting to sell appliances running Fuchsia.
I wasn't directly involved but was a tiny bit of a voyeur. I seem to recall (this was 3-4-5 years ago) that there was a lot of push to try to componentize things in a more Fuchsia-ish way, but this naturally ran up against the realities of how huge and big the Chrome codebase is. And Chrome has its own IPC system (mojo) and its own component model(s), its own threading system, etc. and assumes POSIX stuff throughout, etc.
My suspicion at the time was that as something like Chromium gets ported to Fuchsia the result will be less that Chrome becomes friendly to Fuchsia, as much as that Fuchsia becomes less distinct, and more a "typical" OS, out of pragmatism.
I dunno, I'm curious to see how that effort is going. But I think it accords with your point. Porting big applications to "alternative" operating systems with more interesting or exotic models... you either end up losing the OS's distinctiveness (in which case why not just run in a VM), or having to rewrite a lot from scratch.
Very well said.
I.e., not having any mainstream browser is a big deal for an OS, so when someone asked for a comparison between Plan 9 and Fuchsia, I thought I'd mention it. More precisely, it is a big deal for a user-facing OS, and Plan 9 is mostly user-facing. In fact, I've never heard of anyone using it as, e.g., a web server.
For years, Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS and ChromeOS has used a verified boot process that prevents any malware from surviving a reboot in any of the system software, i.e., anywhere except for the user's home directory and maybe other directories created by the user that the user is responsible for maintaining. I don't suppose 9front has that?
Also when I used drawterm (as part of Plan 9 from Userspace on a Mac) the drawterm windows had no anti-aliasing, which I might have been able to get used to, except that the native-Mac windows used anti-aliasing and switching back and forth I found a jarring experience (and I was never able to figure out how to configure the Mac (and my browser) not to do the anti-aliasing).
(Technically, my browser was doing its own low-level drawing, but it had been carefully tuned by the maintainers of the browser to visually resemble the results of the native Mac drawing systems.)
Also, Silverblue's home page does not even list "secure" or "security" as one of the benefits of Silverblue. (They list reliable, atomic, the ability to revert the system, containerized, developer-friendly, no ads, "all your data belongs to you", and open-source.)
The why is simple: We can run Linux or BSD in a VM and run a browser in there. Besides, the goals of most users is to explore new and exciting ways to share information that doesn't require the efforts of a billion dollar commercial entity with an army of programmers.
The people who come to plan 9 don't come to it because it runs chrome or steam. We're here because we like the architecture. There's so much more work to do and things to explore. Complaining something doesn't work means you're not really interested in OS design so that's fine, just move along and find what you want. That or patches welcome.
They come from the same people (Ken Thompson, Rob Pike). The Go compiler was the first program written for Plan 9, although it processed C code at that time – the Go language would come later. Eventually it was machine translated into Go sources.