f2f

cool! i really like what you're doing.

i can't figure out which one of the several Go9P implementations you started with. or is this something you rolled out yourself? any differences between this and others?

i'm sorry but "i'm no expert" is not an excuse for trying to change people's minds. that's how anti-vaxxers are born.

> Latency != bandwidth.

yes, and you're conflating the two.

> Bandwidth is cheap.

and the speed of light is constant. http1 has issues accessing all available bandwidth, and speed of light ensures that with a limited bandwidth your page load times will suffer. you don't go to web pages that take forever to load. nobody does.

the bandwidth argument is not the argument you should be making. you should be making the argument that today's pages are bloated and we need to work on reducing page/image size. that is being worked on too.

everybody willing to diff http1 and http2 should just take a look at this with a modern browser and imagine it in a standard site context (bigger images, many more site elements):

https://http2.golang.org/gophertiles

http://http2.golang.org/gophertiles

The most famous recent photo of Dennis Ritchie has him sitting in front of a windows desktop, drawterm-ed almost full screen into a Plan 9 CPU server. (drawterm is the name of the program that allowed you to connect local resources to a CPU server and essentially present a window on your current desktop as a Plan 9 terminal)

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00221/97222...

heya, maht! nothing you read below will be news to you, but for the record here's what i think:

as far as the technical arguments against the Plan 9-descendent tools are concerned, yes, they're outdated. but the lack of cruft accumulating over the last 20 years in that toolchain is also the reason why they went with it as bootstrap for Go -- it was simple enough then. this is changing, that's why most of the Go runtime isn't written in C anymore.

the author made the argument that Go's toolchain is hard to port. this is contrary to previous experience with Plan 9's toolchain. i'm hoping 4ad (who did the port to solaris/illumos) can weigh in with his experience, but from what i saw in the commits the process did not take altogether long or appeared arduous. cgo is a separate matter, as we clearly see :)

as far as the author's personal dislike for all things pike that's a different issue altogether. and quite amusing :)

"I used to be with it, but then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me..." -- Grandpa Simpson

he's just rage quitting on his last day of work. see the next post on that site, where pike is called a "world-class jackass" and Plan 9 "a colossal failure".

referring to anything Plan 9 as "colossal" is a new one, i admit :)

plan9 was free software in 2000 when the 3rd release was made available (and before the issues discussed in this article were encountered). this is despite RMS's objections that were parroted by clueless linux fanboys around the net.

as to practicality, plan9 was exactly as practical as phk's supposed "cathedral" unix would've been. at the very least it had 1Friggin'UI instead of many :)

but hey, thanks for the downvote. it's not like we haven't had this discussion in person with phk, our difference in opinions is well known to each other.

    > I updated my laptop. I have been running the development  
    > version of FreeBSD for 18 years straight now, and 
    > compiling  even my Spartan work environment from source 
    > code takes a  full day, because it involves trying to 
    > make sense and  architecture out of Raymond's
    > anarchistic software bazaar.

ahh, you should've tried Plan 9, phk. 130 seconds to compile all software and libraries, 6 seconds to compile a new kernel. no bazaar there...

of course, this didn't appeal to you back then, did it? ;)

I took a class by P. Prusinkiewicz (Dr. P) at the University of Calgary as part of my graduate program more than a decade ago. Still remember it fondly and keep all my presentations and slides from the coursework.

Unfortunately I don't think I did very well as I was very headstrong and rewrote the C++-based L-system generator in Haskell. That didn't get me any extra points :)

to see how much the runtime contributes to the size of the binary use an empty main. for hello world you bring in the fmt package which is a relative heavyweight:

    $ cat > t.go
    package main
    func main() {}
    $ go build t.go 
    $ wc -c t
      623280 t
    $ nm t | wc -l
        1029
    $ cat > t.go
    package main
    import "fmt"
    func main() { fmt.Println("hello world") }
    $ go build t.go 
    $ nm t | wc -l
        2541

plan9 kernel builds take less that 10 seconds.

there was an x11 port to plan9. it's still there:

    $ cl -addr sources.cs.bell-labs.com:564
    9p> ls -l extra/X11.iso.bz2
    -rw-rw-r-- rsc sys 24878378		X11.iso.bz2
    9p> 

that didn't sink plan9. what sank plan9 was that linux was there and was "good enough", and that it took a full decade to realize that the concepts of plan9 can't be backported to unix/linux piecemeal. that they fit much better together in a coherent system that didn't carry the baggage of unix (the root user, for example). this is what the original plan9 papers were trying to say: it's a rethinking, you have to cut the cord to eliminate the baggage. the baggage has proven sufficiently heavy that more than 20 years later you're not seeing private namespaces in linux. instead you see fully virtualized instances of the operating system -- with all the baggage that they carry -- and most efforts are focused on making them work efficiently, rather than on inventing something truly original.

that said, if plan9 was open sourced in 1995 and had taken over, we wouldn't be talking now about a linux behemoth bolting systemd onto itself, but a plan9 one. successful software grows itself into morbidity. plan9 would've been no different.

If by "cpu server allocator" you mean cluster/distributed scheduler, no there's no such thing. late in the life of plan9 an attempt was made to craft something like that on top of it but by then both BL and the public had passed on the system. You have to remember that "cluster" as a term postdates this talk. A network in the view of Plan 9's creators in 1990 was composed of heterogeneous hardware and you made the choice beforehand whether you wanted to run on the big multicore system, the one with the faster I/O, or the one that displayed graphics. a homogenous entity of cheap COTS systems where everything looked the same and you made the choice where to run based on availability took another decade to materialize.

Plan 9 did implement lightweight processes by the time it was open sourced in 2000 using coroutines (http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/2/thread) which were a C port of the primitives used in the Alef programming language, which never made it to open source land. Alef appeared in 1992.

re2 is described here: http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp3.html

the internet is my source.

C and Java are not the subject here.

rust was announced the same week Go was. it took a while to bring to the open, but it got the "swoon" demographic under its wing almost immediately.

your "should" and "should" should be replaced with "doesn't" and "doesn't" or at best "may" and "may".

more code has been written in Go than Haskell, Rust and Ocaml combined.

well, rust has all those powerful features. it's been out in the open for exactly as long as Go has.

"all goroutines are asleep - deadlock".

https://code.google.com/p/go/source/browse/src/runtime/proc....

but i searched this page and here they are! ;)

nice project, and pretty cool visualizations!

i did port a lot of the xscreensavers to plan9 and then a few of them to go when go came out. this reminds me a lot of some of them. now if only there was a way to animate them!

https://code.google.com/p/goxscr/

they work using x11, mostly on linux :)

you made my day!

troll#, of course ;)

i loved plan9. i was into it before the 3rd edition was released and i built a small career out of it. it was and still is the most enjoyable system to work with.

i'm happy it's getting its dues in retrospect and is now considered a cool thing, but i can't help but remember how just after the first open release everybody and their uncle kept complaining about trivia: "how can I become root?" "it doesn't do x11?" "its license isn't gnu-open?"

rob is probably right: licensing killed plan9, but so did everybody who couldn't see the forest for the trees. the linux juggernaut was too popular back then.