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Yes, i miss the days when i could make changes to the system and recompile in under a minute on Plan9. Such a distraction free programming environment.

Do you always need to rebuild everything? In FreeBSD, for example, you can do eg “cd bin/ls && make all install”; takes seconds.

9front still works.

I don't -- because they never fully went away. I'm typing this on a 9front system right now.

Are there any good articles on the reasons behind some of this stuff? Like beyond performance bit-twiddling, are there issues due to a lot of extra layers for more pluggable infrastructure?

I just don't get how the gulf can be this wide on something so many devs are clearly frustrated about.

Optimizations play a big part.

Modern optimizing compilers are solving lots of hoary computational graph problems, etc., behind the scenes.

What compiler does plan9 use?

It uses a homegrown C compiler; the Go compiler is actually derived from it.