I have witnessed dozens of people making vague statements about how awestruck they are with plan9's vision, and I've always wondered what exactly they mean.
My take is that plan 9 is basically a "pure" rewrite of a unix/posix OS, that takes many underlying principles of unix to their logical conclusions, without the taint of the incremental evolution of the existing systems, yet nevertheless informed by the lessons learned operating real OS systems. The incompatibility is why it hasn't moved forward, though many of the good ideas that are compatible with systems like bsd/linux have since been ported over.
It is really useful exercise to consider, in hindsight, how could we have built a better unix? And a bunch of really smart people participated and came up with some great ideas.
It's difficult to encapsulate specifics because it's a large amount of small details in the design decisions that end up adding up to a lot. You don't need Docker, you don't need Nix, you don't need NFS or SSHFS or Samba. The world doesn't need web browsers to do as much as they already do. So much tooling is made totally redundant by the emergent properties of the system. A monumental amount of engineering cruft, tacked onto *nix by the necessity of outdated system design, is simply cut away. How? It's little things like namespaces not requiring a tasteless amount of systems bureaucracy boilerplate. The amount of power that can be leveraged by shell scripts rather than dozens of low level API calls in C is not to be scoffed at. It's more than this, so much more. But it's not something you're going to "get" by reading about it.
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I have witnessed dozens of people making vague statements about how awestruck they are with plan9's vision, and I've always wondered what exactly they mean.
Maybe try https://9p.io/sys/doc/9.html
My take is that plan 9 is basically a "pure" rewrite of a unix/posix OS, that takes many underlying principles of unix to their logical conclusions, without the taint of the incremental evolution of the existing systems, yet nevertheless informed by the lessons learned operating real OS systems. The incompatibility is why it hasn't moved forward, though many of the good ideas that are compatible with systems like bsd/linux have since been ported over.
It is really useful exercise to consider, in hindsight, how could we have built a better unix? And a bunch of really smart people participated and came up with some great ideas.
It's difficult to encapsulate specifics because it's a large amount of small details in the design decisions that end up adding up to a lot. You don't need Docker, you don't need Nix, you don't need NFS or SSHFS or Samba. The world doesn't need web browsers to do as much as they already do. So much tooling is made totally redundant by the emergent properties of the system. A monumental amount of engineering cruft, tacked onto *nix by the necessity of outdated system design, is simply cut away. How? It's little things like namespaces not requiring a tasteless amount of systems bureaucracy boilerplate. The amount of power that can be leveraged by shell scripts rather than dozens of low level API calls in C is not to be scoffed at. It's more than this, so much more. But it's not something you're going to "get" by reading about it.