One of the reasons why Plan 9 is nice is that we do not have to copy everyone else's mistakes and assume their baggage for supporting X, Y, and Z environments.
A lot of how things become nicer on plan 9/9front is someone took the chance to take a step back, analyze the problem practically, and design our own solution. If we put a focus on "getting the garden variety of UNIX software" running on 9front, you start to lose what makes it different in the first place. Being different and detached from the mainstream flow of software is what gives us the freedom to be our own thing. There are other issues involved with tying ourselves to something upstream, right now 9front exists entirely as one self contained repo. There is shithub, yes, but because our base systems ships an entire working OS and utilities there's not much of a need for dependency tracking and version pinning etc. If upstream rust or zig had support for 9front, there is still a logistical problem with using those to write tooling we ship with the system. Doubly so, if it means bootstrapping from a cross compiled binary. Those problems could be solved yes, but I like that right now we are not beholden to another software project for our /sys/src to continue to compile. I also feel like the promises of the "ecosystem" or deceptive, it is very often that software has assumptions about the system outside of what the stdlib gives. Even with go, no one is _really_ testing that their stuff works on Plan 9, and they're using utilities (fs-notify comes to mind) which have to bake in support per os. There's no free lunch there, even with go there is sometimes a large porting effort required, and you're at the whim of the upstream maintainer of X library to care enough to merge your code. That's hard when most projects (rightfully) want CI for testing build targets and that's not exactly a straight forward thing with 9front. My point being, instead of using external software as a way of reconciling deficiencies in the Plan 9 ecosystem, it would be better to forge our own path. Often times adding what is missing is a (comparatively) shockingly low amount of code, take a look at cinap's ssh client or cifs server as an example. The code size is peanuts compared to upstream openssh or samba. Part of the joy of working on Plan 9 is that you're given the freedom to work on these things and understand them, not just port what exists already. Another great example is Ori's git9, again I like not needing upstream git and it's whole bag of assumptions for our version control, and in the end (at least to me) Ori's implementation is a hell of a lot nicer. If people feel like we need something other than C, I'd prefer to see us write something for ourselves, not import another language off the shelf. If you want Node or Rust you know where to find it, I don't think we need them in Plan 9. What is the benefit of Plan 9 if all it does is run Unix software but (very likely) worse? (To be clear I'm not against porting, and have done my own fair share of it. I just want Plan 9 to feel like Plan 9 and not an imitation of what you can get elsewhere. People should have the freedom to use whatever software they want, my focus is more on tools for building the system itself, which has a lot more constraints and considerations) On 7/1/25 16:12, Daniel Maslowski via 9fans wrote: > Pointless FUD. Which is not the Plan 9 way, I hope. > > On another note, Deno would make a sensible choice nowadays. > > On Mon, 30 Jun 2025, 23:53 , <arn...@skeeve.com <mailto:arn...@skeeve.com>> > wrote: > > "Danny Wilkins via 9fans" <9fans@9fans.net <mailto:9fans@9fans.net>> > wrote: > > > Obviously what needs to push is rust and node so that p9 can be a real > > next gen server platform :) Think of all the apps we could run with > electron. > > Adding node is to invite a swarm of security problems. Definitely > not the Plan 9 way, IMHO. > > Has anyone tried to build Gnu Awk under APE? I've always wondered > if it would work there. > > Thanks, > > Arnold > > ------------------------------------------ > 9fans: 9fans > Permalink: > https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tf84d656c78bbda91-M28b35f6965fa81dd25b4fc9a > > <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tf84d656c78bbda91-M28b35f6965fa81dd25b4fc9a> > Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription > <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription> > > *9fans <https://9fans.topicbox.com/latest>* / 9fans / see discussions > <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans> + participants > <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/members> + delivery options > <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription> Permalink > <https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tf84d656c78bbda91-M8fa645cc5ca92f955078f314> ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/Tf84d656c78bbda91-Mbac7dc7aa26c093825b4dcf8 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
