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Hey all. I have recently been very interested in plan 9. I was wondering if you
guys had any critiques of it from a technical perspective. Or just in general what
less common (e.g not a Unix clone) operating system concepts you guys find
most practical / interesting. Thanks! -Setra

setra wrote:Hey all. I have recently been very interested in plan 9. I was wondering if you
guys had any critiques of it from a technical perspective. Or just in general what
less common (e.g not a Unix clone) operating system concepts you guys find
most practical / interesting. Thanks! -Setra

The general idea of rendezvous() (that was I believe first implemented in Plan9 from Bell Labs) I've always found really interesting. And the most interesting thing I can think of right now is the reincarnation server (RS). It basically replaces crashed drivers/servers on-the-fly while the operating system is running and the average user wouldn't notice much except for that a file might take a little longer to open. Thus in theory creating a system that is uncrashable unless the kernel too crashes for some reason. The only implementation is in MINIX3 and hopefully eventually my operating system.

Yeah there are a bunch of cool stuff in plan9. Rendezvous that was mentioned are used as a synchronization point so tasks can exchange messages. There is also a Rendez struct that is used for sleep and wakeup which is really simple and powerful. I implemented that and I was amazed how good it works. We also have the 9p protocol that besides making communication transparent also allows you to multiplex messages which is much easier to handle than to have each server having to handle that by itself. I also like how /net is done with clone files and how you can access information about each window through the filesystem. To mention all the cool stuff here would be too much but these are just some of them.

There was also rendezvous in Symbian and it was thoughly useful. All OS should get the functionality.

It's a shame it hasn't yet turned up on Linux.

I cant believe I have never heard of Symbian. Wikipedia says it was the most popular smart phone OS until 2010.

A note guys. This is not about plan 9 specifically. It is about cool features / ways of doing things, beyond just making a unix clone.

A non-unix-clone operating system I found thoroughly fascinating was Oberon.

I first came across it in the mid 90s, and it was old then. And yet it made Windows 95 and Microsoft Office (which had got the exceptionally excellent VBA by this time) look so very limited and unrefined.

It was (and still is available as an app for the curious) an integrated development environment slash office desktop.

The way components were built and interacted was like a supercharged VCL and has to be experienced to be describable.

An important aspect of Oberon's GUI - one which I mean to emulate - is the tight integration of the underlying language (also called Oberon) with the system. It allowed you to write a section of code and execute it simply by selecting it, much the same way you could in Emacs' Lisp modes, and a method name could be pinned to an area of a window to act as a button. The entire user interface was built up in this manner, and as such was easily configurable.

Plan 9 gave us Utf-8.