In your defence, Hiro, I quite believe at least some of what you said. Plan 9 is superior, aesthetically, but not perfect and graphics is no exception.
Which is unfortunate, because it is also a very difficult field that attracts mostly those who are prone to take short-cuts and apply pragmatic solutions and encourages such behaviour even from the most meticulous of developers. My own anecdote revolves around font compression. I tried to convert the tools in the Plan 9 chest (to Go), but I just could not quite pry that knot loose. I consulted the sources, downloaded the description of the compression algorithm, you name it. I don't think the developers intentionally obfuscated the code, I suspect (with Dijkstra) that the code development lent itself to obfuscation in the quest for efficiency. That is a real danger in programming, the real difficulty at the core of "premature optimisation": the risk is that what gets optimised is buggy and once reduced to maximal performance, it's the bugs that get performed maximally and no one can pry them away from the cold clutches of optimised code. What this discussion made me think about is something that's been going through my head a bit of late: given that Plan 9 is so much simpler than the more popular OSes around, how is it that it does not outperform them? Take Skype, for example: I use it exclusively and not exactly willingly for text conferencing, I hadn't made a voice call in Skype for years when a recent Skype audio conference turned out not very successfully. Now, why isn't there a Plan 9 tool that can beat Skype at at least the texting portion of its game? Considering how greedy Skype is of resources, it should not be hard to be (nearly, perhaps even much more) as comfortable and require fewer resources? I understand that developers for Plan 9 are few and far between, but there must be low-hanging fruit out there, or am I also missing some other really important factor? On 5/3/19, hiro <[email protected]> wrote: > actually i take that back, no thanks to skip, i meant dan! > > -- Lucio De Re 2 Piet Retief St Kestell (Eastern Free State) 9860 South Africa Ph.: +27 58 653 1433 Cell: +27 83 251 5824 FAX: +27 58 653 1435
