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Comment by efficax | Hacker News Reader

It sucks that many of the great innovations from Plan9 never became widely adopted, but systems research still goes on! Containerization, for example, and virtualization, have given rise to a whole new field of systems research. And a lot of it is being done in Pike's own language, `go`

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Au contraire ;) Innovations of Plan9 landed in mainstream systems: Unicode, Namespaces => Containers. If you will, Docker is the result of a mainstream implementation of a Plan9 feature.

I was recently thinking, if you want to create a popular system feature, you just need to copy something from Plan9. IMHO the only reason nobody uses Plan9 is its bad hardware and userland software support. Also I've given up hope this will ever change, however it's a nice innovation testbed somehow.

Some of us are still using Plan 9. I'm glad to see the connection between Plan 9 namespaces and containers mentioned, most people have missed that step in following the evolutionary pathway from unix chroot through BSD jails to Linux containerization. There is actually a semi-secret modern Plan 9 container-like service platform, but the Plan 9 community doesn't usually try to publicize/commercialize its work so almost nobody knows about it.

I don’t see the connection that clearly. You forget about OS/390 virtualisation. That would be what comes closest to what Docker is today, as the earliest innovation I can think of.

Oh really which service would that be? ;)

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