The 9front people are doing a great job of dragging Plan 9 into the 21st century after the project was abandoned by the original developers (the 9front people would say “before they went on display at Google” lol)
In addition to better hardware support, some novel features have come out of the 9front project: new filesystems on-disk or otherwise (very very looking forward to ori’s “good enough filesystem” ending up in the system), a completely new and from scratch Git implementation (one of the only other complete implementations in the world), kernel tracing infrastructure similar to Solaris (idk much about this one but it’s called “dtracy”), etc etc etc
And if you wanna realllly be completely bewildered, look into mycroftiv’s ANTS (Additional Namespace Tools for Plan 9) project. I was lucky enough to meet this guy once online before he died a few years ago, he had some wild ideas about how to construct distributed operating systems, absolutely love it lol. The Plan 9 community (mainly united around 9front) is a community of dreamers. My dream is a kind of “social operating system” in the service of communism, uniting the computational resources and information of all of society into a grid of computers that anyone can use, but also serving as a virtual meeting and collaborative space and as a distributed economic planning apparatus. Idk it’s a grand dream (and Plan 9 is far from that, although there is a “grid” a lot of the 9front people use to talk to each other and collaborate on) but I like to think about it and try to make parts of it real lol
The Plan 9 developers once referred to their project as an attempt to build a Unix out of a lot of little systems instead of a system out of a lot of little Unixes (and the latter approach has won out under the market-based system, most people’s idea of distributed computing is like… Docker and Kubernetes )
I hope that makes sense, I am very tired lol
I wrote a bit more about Plan 9 and its history to another Hexbear here a few months ago if you wanna read: https://hexbear.net/comment/4812784
Yess, I love 9front
The 9front people are doing a great job of dragging Plan 9 into the 21st century after the project was abandoned by the original developers (the 9front people would say “before they went on display at Google” lol)
In addition to better hardware support, some novel features have come out of the 9front project: new filesystems on-disk or otherwise (very very looking forward to ori’s “good enough filesystem” ending up in the system), a completely new and from scratch Git implementation (one of the only other complete implementations in the world), kernel tracing infrastructure similar to Solaris (idk much about this one but it’s called “dtracy”), etc etc etc
And if you wanna realllly be completely bewildered, look into mycroftiv’s ANTS (Additional Namespace Tools for Plan 9) project. I was lucky enough to meet this guy once online before he died a few years ago, he had some wild ideas about how to construct distributed operating systems, absolutely love it lol. The Plan 9 community (mainly united around 9front) is a community of dreamers. My dream is a kind of “social operating system” in the service of communism, uniting the computational resources and information of all of society into a grid of computers that anyone can use, but also serving as a virtual meeting and collaborative space and as a distributed economic planning apparatus. Idk it’s a grand dream (and Plan 9 is far from that, although there is a “grid” a lot of the 9front people use to talk to each other and collaborate on) but I like to think about it and try to make parts of it real lol
The Plan 9 developers once referred to their project as an attempt to build a Unix out of a lot of little systems instead of a system out of a lot of little Unixes (and the latter approach has won out under the market-based system, most people’s idea of distributed computing is like… Docker and Kubernetes
)
I hope that makes sense, I am very tired lol
I wrote a bit more about Plan 9 and its history to another Hexbear here a few months ago if you wanna read: https://hexbear.net/comment/4812784