What's the problem with GC? Between C and Go (and maybe Scheme) there's not much choice of languages on plan 9 today.

So not having to think about memory management in a browser pet project is surely the best choice when it comes to a relatively ambitious project as this.

Also of note, Limbo (the language the successor was written is) is also garbage collected, so it's not like it's against the spirit of plan 9. The predecessor language, Alef, supposedly was abandoned in part because it didn't have GC.

There's also Myrddin and Ocaml, and there was some work on getting Zig working on Plan 9

Lua works pretty nicely also.

If we're including languages that have no intention of being compiled, there's also TCL and Python 2

Don't forget Perl

Indeed, we need more such projects to clean our industry from non believers.

Alef for Plan 9 was going to be GC based, and even though it went in another way, Inferno and Limbo clearly fix that error.

Go itself is pretty much Alef 2.0

It could have kept dynamic loading and pick types from Limbo, though.

https://pkg.go.dev/plugin but not for all platforms.

It is not the same.

Not only it doesn't work in all platforms, they already planned to drop it once, and uses low level dlopen like API.

I wonder how much ad-hoc GC popular browsers have and what the tradeoffs are in comparison to using a runtime with a GC and avoiding allocations where necessary.