9Front's 'Humanbiologics' is out: Unix 2.0 programmers still busy bunnies | Hacker News Reader

9Front's 'Humanbiologics' is out: Unix 2.0 programmers still busy bunnies

theregister.com

37 pointslproven29 comments

There’s also an active community of 9Planers in sdf. They do regular boot camps and try to help people learn how to use 9 Plan.

https://sdf.org/plan9/

I ought to check out SDF, but it's not like I am short of *nix machines at home, an ocean away...

Interesting. I must have been living under a rock because I'd not heard of this before. I'm very intrigued! I want to stop using Linux and was looking at the BSDs to replace it, but perhaps this is a better path.

I would take the FreeBSD path, then install a 9Front on bhyve, i really love 9Front, but sometimes i just need to open a office file or want to play a dos-(box) game.

However have fun!

While Dosbox is mostly out of the question due to C++. 9front just recently has acquired ports of Duke Nukem 3D, Hexen, Heretic, and Rise of the Triad. With a port of the existing wipeout rewrite still in progress, it runs but is still currently unplayable.

WoW Rise of the Triad?? Time to start my 9front dell asap!! Thanks for the hint!

Thanks for the advice! I think it's worth trying it out. I have a couple of dozen machines that I want to migrate. I can migrate one of them to this as a test.

Btw: I completely forgot to link the YT of "adventuresin9":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7igZ1fR7ZA

That's why I keep writing about it. ;-)

It is amazing but unless you are the sort of person who knocks together a quick C program to do your work, it's not much _use_.

It has been used on at least one supercomputer:

https://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/blue_gene/petascale_plan_9/

But it can run VMs, so you could run a VM under it... but it might be more use running under a VM itself, alongside more mainstream OSes.

Go is among the modern languages that are totally supported, so there's a huge usable ecosystem out there

> unless you are the sort of person who knocks together a quick C program to do your work, it's not much _use_.

I am such a person. :)

I may even be able to port other compilers to it. Whether I'd be willing to is a different question that depends on the length of my to-do list, though.

:-) Then you may well enjoy it.

Plan 9 changes the way the C compiler works a little: for instance it is now prohibited to #include the same headers into files that are #included into other files. No nested duplicate #includes.

https://go.dev/talks/2012/splash.article

But the result is much much faster compilation.

Why? Way less bloated, duly noted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_User_Space

https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/

Why what?

I randomly stumbled around in their repository and found the following file. What's the deal with all the racism?

http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/4573bb5550de7917...

That appears to be written by or for Terry Davis, a programmer with schizophrenia who became somewhat of a meme. He died a few years ago. It’s possible he wrote it himself as he would post racist rants everywhere, including on HN.

I can’t tell from the page - is that part of the main repo?

Thanks, now when I checked it again I see a reference to TempleOS so that is for sure it. I wonder why they put this in the repo of 9front though. It's the main repo according to the release page. https://9front.org/releases/2023/11/22/0/

Edit: There are files with quotes from a bunch of other famous people from the OS community there too. Ken Thompson, Theo de Raadt etc.

I thought it might have been something that got slipped in, deleted, and now only exists as part of VC history. If it’s stored in the main repo and being packaged as part of the OS that’s not good… Terry was an interesting character but not exactly someone to idolize and that reflects poorly on the project, to say the least

Any given part of the 9front website is a fractal piece of a much larger whole, resembling the larger whole in one key respect: when any given person looks at it they're likely to say "what the fuck is this shit?"

[Author/submitter here]

That is something I try to address in the article, FWIW.

Thanks for the brief history of Plan9. However, your agrument for their propoganda is "they have been spurned so they use abstract shit". This really misses the point that Plan9 is actual real art. It is beyond most peoples comprehension. What the art is doing is the same as what the OS is doing. Is is reflecting itself across multiple levels to self propogate and be unpacked by the unconscious. It is not "we have been spurned" it is "we spurn you as inferiour beings, unable to comprehend our multi-level, dangerous reality".

That seems like a valid interpretation to me.

I didn't mean to say it was the only reason or motivation.

So Inferno is UNIX 3.0, I guess.

[Author/submitter here]

Yes, that's my take on it.

I want to do an article on Inferno at some point, but there is not much news to report.

To report even on what it is all about would be news to many folks, as most seem to stop at Plan 9.

Research Unix11 = Plan9

Research Unix12 = Inferno

to be correct ;)

:-)

Not trying to disparage but: how is Inferno a complete break from Plan9 ? I mean there's some fundamentally breaking changes (it's just(TM) a VM, the language is brand new) but I don't feel like they're the kind of changes that revolutionized the way we do computing compared to Plan9, the way Plan9 did over Unix.

Now of course that doesn't mean Inferno doesn't have its own merits: limbo is a probably an important step towards the kind of programing that Go enables

So having a memory safe language for userspace, leaving C only for kernel stuff, isn't revolutionary versus traditional UNIX?

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