What I would love to see is not a rewrite but a rethink and a new take on plan9 concepts with a new implementation. Not likely though.
> On Sep 1, 2026, at 8:33 PM, Ron Minnich <[email protected]> wrote: > > While it is likely that rewrites frequently don't make sense, I can > think of several cases where rewrites made sense. Rewriting the C > compiler from (B? BCPL? I forget) to C made sense to me; rewriting > Unix from assembly to C did as well. I spent a summer with the V6 > fortran compiler, all PDP-11 assembly, including the bug that occurred > when a single comment was more than 32767 bytes; that needed > rewriting, though it was a fun piece of code. Probably, rewriting the > Go compiler in Go was a good move. > > We got a net gain in u-root when we rewrote many Unix commands in Go: > removal of old nonsense (The C version of hdparm supports standards > that were killed by ANSI decades ago), lots of unit tests, the large > number of tools that help improve code, and the ability to use the Go > AST package to do the source-to-source transformation that lets us > pack almost 200 commands in a few MiB in flash; that's now deployed on > tens of millions of machines in data centers, and would have been very > hard to do in C. > > So, I'll admit you are probably right in many cases, but exceptions > exist. Sometimes rewriting makes sense. > > > On Tue, Sep 1, 2026 at 5:16 PM Noam Preil <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Tldr: no. It's a better c++, not a better C, and rewrites never make sense. >> Zig is good if you want to manage complicated projects in a better way; >> plan9 is good for when you want your code to be simple. >> 9fans / 9fans / see discussions + participants + delivery options Permalink ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Td859d3c6cefc922f-Ma14a063b65b72da8d9d9621f Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
