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Comment by Bayart | Hacker News Reader

Plan 9 seems to be disproportionately influential for an OS nobody who's not into systems engineering has ever heard about.

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When it was first announced, it wasn't clear it would end up being so esoteric, but I remember that Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Rob Pike were working on it, and maybe Brian Kernighan too?

Timing-wise, it was too late for what they ended up doing, but anything all those people worked on is bound to have some interesting ideas.

It's been weird watching the rise of iOS loosen the reliance on, or even awareness of, files, when 9P was all about files. Files for everything!

Was timing the issue though? Wasn't it released during that period of confusion of the Unix wars before GNU/Linux took over the world?

I had the impression that it was held back by its proprietary license.

> I had the impression that it was held back by its proprietary license.

That was my impression, too. And then it got relicensed to a FOSS license... that was GPL-incompatible. And then it got relicensed again to GPLv2, and then it got relicensed yet again to its current MIT license.

In any case, each of these license changes was too little too late to really improve Plan 9's practicality from a "can I legally use this?" standpoint.

I tried to install it once, a long time ago (around 2000?). Linux was already taking off, BSD's had the possibility to overtake it, other unices were made available more for the end user.

But basically, the hardware support was pretty bad. It took me a long time to find a SCSI controller which was supported, when ATA disks were already standard for years. Same with network- oder graphic cards.

Nowadays, if esoteric OS's would just support standard Vmware hardware, they'd be much more successful (looking at you fuchsia!)

It's a similar story with the Self programming language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_(programming_language). There are many software engineers and computer scientists who never heard of Self, but Self's prototype-based approach to object-oriented programming had a major influence on JavaScript, and a lot of the work done on making fast virtual machines for Self made it in the Java Virtual Machine.

to be fair, it's where UTF-8 debuted

and /proc

Unfortunately, kids these days seem to be afraid of files. For a hardcore unix fan, curl and wget are useless tools when you can just cat /www/url

It's seems nice on a first glance. But how do you set headers and content type for example?

You echo the request into /www/url and cat the response from it

or even better, to avoid state, the url "file" is executable and you pipe through it:

    /www/url < request > answer

that already exists, the command is "wget -i - -o -"

How does it know where to send it? Does it just assume it should use the contents of the Host header and send the request there or is the "url" in your path the destination? Does it support things like SNI?[1] Can you spoof that? Does it expect clients to parse out the raw output of the HTTP response? I have so many questions. From a quick glance this seems a lot harder to work with than curl for both trivial and non-trivial uses.

I tried to find docs on it, but couldn't. If you could link me to some, I'd appreciate it.

[1] After posting this I remember like a doofus this is an OS from the 90s. Of course it doesn't. But a similar question could be asked about any other TLS level setting. That's just one I've had to spend more time debugging using curl in the past.

To be fair you'd probably end up with a tool like curl just for setting all the options and headers, but it would just be a wrapper around sending the request to the url file. Just like there are tools for reading and parsing files in /proc.

/proc predates plan9, plan9 just made it hierarchical

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procfs#History

> kids these days seem to be afraid of files

Sad but true. Android and iOS are the worst offenders I've seen. They're apparently trying to completely get rid of the concept of files altogether, which is really unfortunate for anyone wanting to build cool stuff on those platforms.

I understand there can be security benefits but at what cost.

> They're apparently trying to completely get rid of the concept of files altogether

I’ve never followed Android very closely but iOS began with no user-facing notion of files and added one many years and major releases later. Granted they’re not Unix everything-is-a-file, as in you can’t execute them or do all sorts of other everything-is-a-file operations with them. But adding mostly-general file functionality is definitely not trying to get rid of the concept.

/proc is cute for manual tasks but utterly broke as an API due to inherent races and issues passing context around.

So utterly broke that the poor "htop" program cannot work at all... oh wait

     $ strace htop 2>/tmp/e   # wait for htop to load and then press 'q'
     $ cat /tmp/e | grep ^open | grep /proc | wc -l
     49817

htop is essentially "find /proc" with a pretty output. Is htop broken for you?

There’s no need to be snarky, especially when you’re missing the point. htop missing a race on a PID is no big deal. GDB doing so is a critical issue. /proc is nice to have for diagnostics but once again it makes for terrible API.

And yet Plan 9 has a curl/wget equivalent, `hget`.

In the ideal world this would be a two-line wrapper that just calls cat on the given url

UTF-8 worth prize.

It's mostly coz some people that worked on it went to big companies. Go being one example.

I think you're looking at the wrong end of the timeline. The people who built it had already built UNIX and C (and one of them would later write Limbo). Go's initial splash in the "press" was helped massively by that pedigree.

I do have distinct memories of Go's initial hype being « Ken Thompson and Rob Pike did this ».

I meant that if same people went to work to some small unknown company nobody would care as none of their software would have a pull of something pushed by Google

I know that's what you meant and you absolutely have it backwards. These are the people who built some of the most iconic technology BEFORE building Plan 9. Are you seriously not familiar with their work on UNIX and C at Bell Labs? Because all of them were legends long before going to Google. Them going to Google was a big deal because of who they already were, not Google. If you're not old enough to remember their ideas being a big deal before they joined Google you need to go do some reading because you're lacking pretty real historical context.

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