[geeks] Plan9 - anyone familiar with this?

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, 20 Sept 2022 at 21:15, Patrick Giagnocavo <patrick at zill.net> wrote:
>
> Hi all
>
> I am playing around with 9Front.org's implementation of Plan9 (has better x86 drivers, supposedly) in a VM.
>
> Anyone else played around with this OS?

Very very briefly, for a Register article a decade ago.

There is continuing low-level activity. There's a Raspberry Pi port,
done by the same chap that did the first ever port of Unix outside of
Bell Labs.

There are 2 spin-off projects which are attempting to modernise it:

• Harvey OS -- https://harvey-os.org/

They're trying to replace the C compiler with GCC and bring it
slightly more in line with modern FOSS xNix.

• Jehanne OS -- http://jehanne.io/

Somewhat hostile relationship with Harvey OS. The developer accuses
the Harvey team of stealing code and removing attribution.

Of course the logical successor of Plan 9 was Inferno:

https://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/

The limitation of Plan 9 is that you can't start processes on other
nodes on the network if they have different CPU architectures; like
Unix, it needs natively-compiled binaries, so if you want to access an
Arm box from an x86 one, you'll need to recompile your code.

Inferno fixes that. It replaces C with a new, improved, modernized
language called Limbo. Limbo code is compiled for a virtual CPU
architecture, and the kernel contains a runtime VM for this called
Dis. Most of the OS is written in Limbo and the same compiled binaries
can execute on any supported CPU architecture.

In this, it resembles Tao Group's Taos and its more-developed
successors Intent and Elate. This OS was _nearly_ the basis of the
next-gen Amiga, but Amiga Inc switched focus again, to QNX and then
sold off the OS to Hyperion who built a PowerPC native version of the
classic OS instead.

I have had very brief plays with Plan 9, Inferno and Oberon, which is
the Niklaus Wirth OS and programming language which inspired the Plan
9 UI. I found Inferno significantly easier to use, and I wish some of
Inferno's UI had been backported to Plan 9. I still wonder if it might
be possible to merge them somehow.

Oberon is its own thing, totally un-Unix-like, and something like 1%
of the size of even a tiny Unix. Of them all, I somewhat prefer Oberon
but I barely know how to work it. I've managed to write and compile
"Hello world," though, which is more than I ever did on Plan 9 or
Inferno.



-- 
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