On Wed, Sep 02, 2026 at 10:18:47AM -0700, Bakul Shah via 9fans wrote: > 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. >
I still think that Ron has a point with NIX (Unix was not designed when numerous tightly coupled cores existed; and Unix succeeded because it was a simple---to the point---answer to the hardware _then_ available) and thus hope that the "rethink and new take" will take place by evolving the code with this new point of view. I have already written this on this list, but taking the papers and documentation about Plan9 (from the Bell Labs) and amending them (thus not a rewrite, but an edition) is also a very good exercise. > > 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 -- Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ kergis +dot+ com> http://www.kergis.com/ http://kertex.kergis.com/ Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Td859d3c6cefc922f-Mc9d70bcd756e32d08dc66e14 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
