In Praise of Plan 9
Whenever I read a praise for the conceptual cleanliness and power of niche operating systems, I remind myself:<p>The current mainstream platforms are as complicated as they are because of <i>performance</i>.<p>Abstractions are fine until you realize you&#x27;re doing thousands of network round-trips to draw a window, so what if you short-circuited that?<p>Yes the 9P protocol sounds great and cleaner than FUSE but what&#x27;s the IOPS?<p>The reason only some of Plan 9s concepts made it elsewhere was because those were the ones that could be implemented without too steep a performance penalty (or where performance didn&#x27;t matter).<p>(No excuses for sockets though :p)