Plan 9 Is a Uniquely Complete Operating System

Re:Plan 9 Is a Uniquely Complete Operating System by linguae on Saturday July 27, 2024 @11:07PM (#41090972)

Plan 9 was heavily influenced by the Xerox PARC Mesa/Cedar interface, which influenced Wirth’s Project Oberon. I forget whether Project Oberon directly influenced Plan 9, but I’ve heard people argue that Rob Pike, one of the leaders of the Plan 9 project at Bell Labs, was heavily influenced by Wirth when it came to programming language design, even if the syntax was closer to C instead of Wirth languages like Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon. With that said, there are major similarities between the interfaces of Cedar/Mesa, Project Oberon, and Plan 9.

A few years ago I thought about what it would take to implement a more conventional desktop GUI on top of Plan 9, but I’ve oscillated back and forth between wanting Plan 9 with a Mac-like desktop versus wanting a modern Lisp/Smalltalk machine (with object-oriented underpinnings instead of Plan 9’s “everything is a file” interfaces) with a Mac-like desktop.

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Re:Plan 9 Is a Uniquely Complete Operating System by pjmlp on Sunday July 28, 2024 @02:38AM (#41091611)

You see Oberon's influence on how ACME editor works, and later the OS dynamism enjoyed by Inferno and Limbo, that everyone usually forgets about.

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Re:Plan 9 Is a Uniquely Complete Operating System by akritid on Sunday July 28, 2024 @03:12AM (#41091734)

Inferno is not a successor. For example you can have Golang for Plan 9 but doesn’t make much sense on Inferno. You would even run Inferno on Plan 9 on some scenarios. I suspect most people who know about Plan 9 also know about Inferno, but it’s just a different thing, does not supersede it in general.

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Re:Plan 9 Is a Uniquely Complete Operating System by pjmlp on Sunday July 28, 2024 @03:32AM (#41091797)

Plan 9 => Inferno

Alef => Limbo => Go.

Being able to target Plan 9 with Go doesn't make sense, that isn't how historical evolution works.

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Re:Plan 9 Is a Uniquely Complete Operating System by akritid on Wednesday July 31, 2024 @11:02PM (#41125785)

I suspect you would have to port Go to run on Dis, the VM. C is for the OS. It’s a different design, without mmu. Plan 9 is still a classic OS with hardware isolation

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