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The Plan 9 Foundation

plan9foundation.org

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Better use 9front, the new version even has a new filesystem (gefs).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juFndFy72gI

And a good plan9/9front yt-channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@adventuresin9/videos

https://web.archive.org/web/20250206173149/https://plan9foun...

Thanks

Nice, but I rather see Inferno being further developed, instead of Plan 9.

Then again I am not taking part in either, so it is a worthless opinion.

I consider Inferno more interesting too, to be honest.

I think it has to do a lot with C vs Alef/Limbo.

Go has had a strong influence from P9-flavoured C; the first Go compiler was derived directly from P9 CC, and it took the route of generating machine code rather than using a bytecode VM; instead opting for near-trivial cross-compilation (again, very much in P9 style). Even the Go CI/CD workers ran on Plan 9 (I don't know if they still do).

Plan 9 has also had a very strong influence on wmii, dwm, and suckless.org in general; the suckless people consider C and rc as the least-sucky programming languages. There are some pretty strong ties/cross-influences between suckless, 9front, cat-v (RIP Uriel), etc.

Meanwhile 9front is de facto the only community seriously dedicated to carrying the torch. It just looks like Inferno/Limbo (despite having actually been deployed in production by Lucent) turned out to be a dead-end after all.

Vita Nuova is still up, so some people are using it somehow and keep the infrastructure running.

Also even though it started as an anti-Sun/Java project from Bell Labs, it was also taken as an opportunity to fix Plan 9 design errors.

Rob Pike for example, has some quotes on how he thinks it was a mistake not to add automatic memory managemet to Alef, and going back to C replacing Alef.

Inferno's approach to a fully managed userspace with a JIT, something that in modern times ChromeOS and Android is what we have closest to in mainstream computing, is also why there are some Limbo features not yet available in Go, like proper plugins (the current package isn't really it), although maybe one could argue net/rpc is the answer there.

Me too. But it stalled after 64bit became a thing (there is a dis VM port to 64bit but I lost track of it)

What about community forks like 9front that provides updates and improvements? Will they be ignored?

Who is exactly behind the foundation?

Yep 9front is alive and well. They're occasionally adding new drivers, fixing bugs, making semi-regular releases, dog-fooding the thing daily, etc. Also the artwork/banter is top-notch (if you ignore a couple loud controversies).

It's more about preservation, like a museum of software history.

hug of death for the website? It takes a lot of time to load and sometimes if fails.

I want to make a very unfair joke at this point. I'm pretty sure we've all felt it about dogfooding, at one point or another. But in truth, it would be supposition.

Any site can get hugged to death or have a bad day.

None of the Plan9 HTTP servers I tried was particularly scalable—although you could build your own in Go and it would run OK.

Did you happen to look at caddy? It at least used to have some degree of support for plan9: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/1093

Nah. The whole ethos of Plan9 doesn’t really play well with popular stuff :)

Put the Web on K9P and stay inside plan9 to manage content but accept scaleable pods to serve it?

Cheating.. but it's at least a red headed bastard grandchild

At that point, maybe it should be The Inferno Foundation, and have it written in Limbo.

It would probably actually work very well, considering my very limited experience with the dis VM.

Please, please set up a forge. I don't care if it's Git, I don't care if it's codeberg, Gitlab, or GitHub. I just want to not use email if I don't have to.

Does this count? https://github.com/plan9foundation

Your welcome:

https://shithub.us/

What's a forge in terms of a software project?

Code forge - place where the code is stored (github/gitlab/codeberg/etc)

Oh, interesting, TIL. I never heard this before except in brand names like SourceForge. I only knew them as repository hosting services.

More context if anyone is interested

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)

> in FOSS development communities and since the inception of the first SourceForge fork in 2001, the term forge is still commonly used to designate online collaborative software platforms

In fairness to the person asking the question, I've seen the term "forge" used a lot more in the previous six months than in the previous decade or two. Not sure what that's about.

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