Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace
Plan 9 elicits in my head the same kind of thoughts as Lisp -- I find them both extremely appealing on an intellectual level, and can&#x27;t help but wonder why there isn&#x27;t more of them around in the &quot;real world&quot;.<p>As a software developer, my main use of my computer is writing &#x2F; building &#x2F; running code and surfing the web, mostly in read-only mode but also to interact with others via stuff like slack.  I have always wondered how difficult it would be to make Plan 9 a viable platform for these requirements, and why this is not so today (or maybe it is and I just don&#x27;t know where to look): does the difficulty lie in porting programs that already run on other operating systems?  Are there other, deeper reasons?  Is it possible today to run stuff like vim, gcc &#x2F; g++, python, java, node, zig, rust, firefox on Plan 9?  If not, is it possible to port these, or are there fundamental architectural reasons against it?<p>Note: I am willing and happy to try other paradigms, such as acme for editing, but also find it quite baffling that, if it is technically possible, you could not install vim &#x2F; emacs &#x2F; vscode alongside acme.