Introduction to OS Abstractions Using Plan 9 from Bell Labs (2007) [pdf]

It might make sense in theory, but in practice there are very very few Plan 9 users and developers. Fundamental design quality is never a guarantee of "success" as measured by size of the userbase. If you look at the culture of Plan 9 users, there is also often a somewhat adversarial perspective on standard software. It's a complicated topic, with a lot of weird history involving things like Plan 9 not having a decent open source license for a long time. Once the patterns were established, sociocultural issues outweighed any technical issues. You can imagine an alternate history where things all worked out differently, but at present, Plan 9 is hard to view as a realistic option for any kind of mainstream corporate software work. A lot of us think that is probably more of a good thing than a bad thing, economic incentives and software design quality are often misaligned.

The Linux kernel is maintained by hundreds of contributers and Linus is quite cautious about regressions.

Linux has a mature ecosystem and several flavors and components to choose from.

Plan9, while leagues ahead the *nix design architecturally, has a much smaller ecosystem, no real choice in components, and virtually no enterprise support.

Almost no chance, because "mainstream" would require a huge amount of software to be written or ported for the operating system that does not currently exist. When it comes to things like multimedia and games and webbrowsers and standard office-suites that account for the vast majority of the average person's software use, Plan 9 is not an option. It is true that 9front has support for running virtual machines now, but I see little reason that the average person would ever choose to be running LibreOffice in a virtual machine inside Plan 9 as their standard way of working.

I went into some detail here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254250

It's never been widely used for anything, so there is none of that pesky practicality to demonstrate clearly it's just the same old.

There are certain use-cases for which plan9 is not useful. I don't think a solve-every-problem-poorly box is better than a solve-several-problems-well box. For the niches it services, plan9 is sublime.

I also feel that InfernoOS deserves better recognition and interest.

From Inferno OS page [1] :

>>>..As this is part of the underlying system, all applications gain these benefits automatically. 9P runs over various transport protocols including TCP/IP.

9P was originally developed for use with Plan 9 from Bell Labs. A simplified subset called Styx was used in Inferno for a few years, but now Inferno's protocol is exactly the same as 9P. Some manual pages and older papers still refer to Styx. <<<

I think major constraint (or advantage, depending how you look at it) -- is that you can only use GO-like programming language, Limbo, to develop for it. No other language runtime is supported.

[1] http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/design.html

I've always enjoyed your opinion on alternative operating systems and languages. I love plan9, I wore my thesis in it, but that was based on the knowledge that other distributed operating systems existed at the time, amoeba being the most fun to learn about. Now it's a wasteland... And I really would prefer to explore.

I think better or worse isn't the important theme here. It's that we've lost variety...

I'm not a huge fan of Limbo and most of the other changes aren't very compelling imo. I think plan9 is better.

Can you elaborate on this?

Software is usually a product of both intelligent design and evolution, in varying proportions.

Most operating systems, or the most popular operating systems?

The most important distinction between evolution and design, IMO, is that evolution bars forethought, and any refactoring that trips local optima (which in this case, would be breaking backwards-compatibility).

Popular OSes are popular mainly because of their backwards-compatibility and momentum, and are therefore typically unable to be redesigned in any non-evolution fashion.

Isn't that true for most complex systems overall, (software or otherwise)?

I wasn't thinking about another data storage system but more about what core abstractions should be provided by an OS?

For example, could the Erlang model be an OS? Say the OS provides a namespace for a constellation of communicating processes. You still have freedom to implement various languages and configuration systems but you submit your code to a process rather than store it in a 'file system'. Storage is accessed via a process and can be switched out with another process with a different implementation, etc.

You can build Harvey with clang if you prefer, or possibly even pcc. Getting Harvey compiling with GCC/clang meant translating Plan 9's C dialect into ISO C. The translation process means there wasn't a lot of opportunity to introduce GCCisms, so any standards-compliant C compiler should be able to build Harvey. I say should because you may run into one or two small nits that have to be fixed before it'll work, and of course you have to find an up-to-date C compiler that's not GCC or Clang (I guess it would be good to try icc?)

I mean the whole idea of Harvey is that they get Plan 9 building under gcc.

Whether that's a good idea or not depends on who you talk to.