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Comment by jsolson | Hacker News Reader

It's not entirely abandoned. A few years ago Brad Fitzpatrick dropped by my desk because the latest Google Compute Engine virtualization stack rollout had broken Plan 9 on GCE. This was interfering with cutting a new Go release (the official releases ran on VMs running Plan 9). I don't remember the specific breakage, but that was the day we added Plan 9 to the stable of operating systems we run in our CI regression suite against new VM releases.

I don't know if the Go releases are still done on Plan 9, but it seems likely that's still an active use of the OS.

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Some people in the go team were indeed part of the plan9 team, Rob Pike and Russ Cox to mention a few.

Iirc Russ Cox ported Plan9 userspace to Linux when he moved to google, somehow out of frustration. Thanks for that, using acme on Unix is like a hot summer late afternoon fresh beer. Or whatever fresh beverage of your fancy.

Acme on Unix is almost as good as Acme on Plan 9, but I can't stress enough how great it is on a real Plan 9 system inside rio.

p9p acme does introduce multi-line tag displays, though, which is hugely convenient when I want to keep track of lots of line numbers or hold a bunch of Edit commands.

The multi-line tag also helps a lot outside of plan9 because the file paths on plan9 tend to be shorter thanks to the per-process namespaces. e.g. instead of /home/$user/projects/foo you can just bind that to /prj/foo or whatever you like.

I certainly knew about the connections between Go (and so very much other stuff at Google) and Plan 9. I was surprised, at the time, to see the OS itself in use in a production role. Just another example of unexpected tools getting the job done.

Coraid produces ATA over Ethernet storage platforms shipping their own fork of Plan 9 on the devices.

If I had a need for it, or could justify the cash, I'd get one just to play around!

I once almost bought a massive Xerox printer from a graphics shop that was decommissioning it. It had a Xerox Star (running some specialized software) for its brains.

In the end, the workstation was so completely fused to the printer I'd end with a car-sized workstation.

Plan9Port works on Mac OS, Linux, several BSDs etc, and I'm nearly 100% certain existed before Russ moved to google.

It pre-dates Go by a bit for sure, and Go was already underway at Google with Rob Pike before Russ came over (per my recollection).

That said, I too use plan9port, on my mac, for Acme mainly.

Russ just fixed up the thread library so it works more uniformly (and correctly) on all platforms - including Apple Silicon.

I saw the thread fix-up recently. Based on the comments, it seems setcontext/getcontext versus pthreads is becoming less of an issue these days.

Well one is supposed to implement cooperatively scheduled coroutines, and the other is pthreads.

Google+ wasn't good for much, but following Rob Pike was always interesting as he was doing Plan 9 stuff and talking about Go often on there. Linus Torvalds also frequently posted on G+ and was interesting. Twitter just doesn't fill that same space.

I like minimalist and sometimes esoteric dev environments but I must confess that I just don't get acme. I know that some people swear by it but it's hard for me not to think that it's the programming equivalent of listening to music on vinyls.

For one thing it's extremely mouse-driven, which is already disqualifying in my book but to each their own.

The whole "anything can be a tag and you can execute it by clicking the middle mouse button" can seem novel and exciting if you've never used Emacs, which did the whole "everything is configurable and scriptable" a long time ago and IMO better.

Then the lack of syntax highlighting is pure elitism in my book. I tried to give that a chance but when you listen to the arguments of its proponents it often boils down to "colors are childish" and "books are black on white and we read those just fine" which makes complete sense unless you think about it for two seconds.

I genuinely don't get it. When I first read a Vi(m) tutorial it seemed esoteric, complicated and weird, but I understood why some people found it more efficient that way. Watching somebody explain acme reminds me of TempleOS, filled with weird idiosyncrasies of dubious usefulness while lacking super basic features.

"books are black on white and we read those just fine"

Now I wanna see a B&W syntax highlighting setup that uses all the tools available to a book. Font sizes, bold/italics, the use of display fonts here and there, including Comic Sans to highlight Really Bad Ideas...

You laugh but I'm half-way there; I use underlines/bold for things like TODOS/FIXMES, different fonts for comments, different weight for brackets/keywords etc...

I’m not laughing at all, I am all for anything that gets people thinking about how shitty most digital typography is compared to what’s in a well-designed book!

Not quite that, but I used this theme for a good 6 months once: https://github.com/11111000000/tao-theme-emacs

Haha. I love the syntax highlighting debate.

I dropped syntax highlighting a few years ago. My thoughts on it are not "colors are childish" and "books are black on white and we read those just fine." I don't like the computer trying to convey what is important in my text files to me via color. What I think is important and what the computer thinks is important is often different. Then why don't I configure my syntax highlighter to agree with me? It's just another configuration file to keep in sync on the computers I use, and :syntax off is right there... It's the nuclear option for being annoyed that comments are shown in light gray.

I had an “ah-ha” moment when someone compared the mouse in Acme to vim command mode, and the keyboard to edit mode.

Now sam…that’s an editor I just can’t figure out how to be productive in.

I guess you have to use it to see how consistent a workflow it is. The infuriating lack of good keyboard features aside, the acme way is refreshing and inspiring in my experience.

Simple anecdote: many terminal emulators highlight what they recognize as an URL, then make them clickable. Acme allows to make any text clickable and set the selection to a plumber, for action. A path, a git hash, a time stamp, whatever. This is so much better. Some terminal enulators can be used like that, foot natively on wayland, st with patches and urxvt with Perl extensions.

> the lack of syntax highlighting is pure elitism in my book

That might be true.

When you get past the snark, there is a strong argument against syntax highlighting in Plan 9. If your desk is too messy to find anything, tidy it up; if your code is too messy to read, ditto. Syntax highlighting, from this perspective, is like bringing in a mechanical excavator when the answer is to stop digging. If you look at the Plan 9 code, they practiced what they preached.

But that perspective is an elite one, that of research programmers at Bell Labs, where the code is the product.

I would argue that highlighting the syntax is tidying up. It doesn’t stop you from keeping the code clean. Shooting yourself in the foot in order to not walk that much isn’t a compelling argument.

> I know that some people swear by it but it's hard for me not to think that it's the programming equivalent of listening to music on vinyls.

Basically my opinion regarding using UNIX CLI + vim and emacs.

> I don't know if the Go releases are still done on Plan 9, but it seems likely that's still an active use of the OS.

Go still builds. It's just difficult to build it out of the box on 9 because of bootstrap issues. Though not sure if the latest 9 build bug was squashed.

Yes, it is working on the latest releases. Note that for 9front tip, there's one small patch that you need: https://github.com/golang/go/pull/43533

I know that Russ Cox & Rob Pike both still use plan9.

Do we know what distribution they use?

http://aiju.de/b/mac

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