# FreePlan9 ?



## Spartrekus (Jan 27, 2019)

Hello,

One can find Plan9 on the Bell Lab website. Eventually, there  is a project that tries to give opensource and good licensing for Plan9?

Free, Open, like free bier, Plan9.


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## Cthulhux (Jan 27, 2019)

I have no idea what you want to tell us. I use Acme almost every day.


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## Spartrekus (Jan 27, 2019)

Cthulhux said:


> I have no idea what you want to tell us. I use Acme almost every day.



Do you use on Plan9  or BSD?


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## Cthulhux (Jan 27, 2019)

Both.


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## hruodr (Jan 27, 2019)

plan9 user land is ported to unixoids: https://swtch.com/

You can compile it. FreeBSD has it ready as port or package: plan9port

From there you get `sam` and `acme` editors. Very lightweight and nice.

Real plan9 is very selective on the hardware.


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## Spartrekus (Jan 27, 2019)

hruodr said:


> plan9 user land is ported to unixoids: https://swtch.com/
> 
> You can compile it. FreeBSD has it ready as port or package: plan9port
> 
> ...



I  like very much Plan9. Likely the best operating system.

Indeed ultra fast.


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## hruodr (Jan 27, 2019)

Yes, very nice OS, perfectionated unix, but you see here the weight of the habit: Unix/BSD is not perfect, but good enough, and has much support, so that we do not have the energy to switch. And for a real switch, to use it as desktop, we need a web browser there: I think that was the reason of plan9port.

I could run it in FreeBSDs quemu, but very slow. I did not manage and also did not try very much to run it in `bhyve`. In any case: I do not like virtual machines. The last time I managed to install it, was in a very old hardware.


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## Cthulhux (Jan 27, 2019)

There are also the Harvey and Jehanne projects, trying to fix hardware incompatibilities.


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## hruodr (Jan 27, 2019)

I do not think that using `gcc` makes them simpler than plan9. They should concentrate on plan9 instead of ramificating it (as the linux distributions, each of it is called a new "operating system"). In any case is good to know about their existence. And I think the compiler can be seen as CPU driver and should be part of the OS. I find tragic that no BSD has its own compilers, but plan9 has them.


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## Cthulhux (Jan 28, 2019)

pyret said:


> Rob Pike, one of the creators of Go



..., co-creator of the Unicode standard, developer of jim, sam and acme, ...


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## ralphbsz (Jan 29, 2019)

Has anyone bothered to ask Rob Pike what OS he runs on his computer these days?  I know he is reachable, although I don't know whether he bothers to answer questions.


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## Cthulhux (Jan 29, 2019)

Yes, someone did: Rob moved on to macOS. 
https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/


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## kpedersen (Feb 1, 2019)

hruodr said:


> I find tragic that no BSD has its own compilers, but plan9 has them.



I agree! Did BSD ever have one? Amsterdam Compiler Kit? What did 4.3BSD and lower used to use?

I recall, OpenBSD tried to maintain its own (based on pcc) but it was a little bit too much work for what it was worth. They rather spend their time on improving the OS rather than compiler.

I kind of see LLVM/clang as _the_ BSD compiler because all the main ones have moved to it and macOS (with a solid BSD underlying subsystem) has a large amount of input on the project.

I always was impressed with Ken's compiler in Plan9 and the APE layer. Its is extremely usable 
So much so that Go's underlying C compiler used to use it on all platforms (even Windows).


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## Cthulhux (Feb 1, 2019)

kpedersen said:


> Did BSD ever have one?



pcc was the BSD compiler until 4.4BSD which introduced the horrendous GCC instead.


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## hruodr (Feb 1, 2019)

kpedersen said:


> What did 4.3BSD and lower used to use?



pcc was written by Stephen C. Johnson, the yacc man. The parser works bottom up. And you can find it in old BSD 4.

I think, C before this was parsed top down:

(1) https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

(2) ftp://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/pub/pcc-docs/porttour.ps


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## Spartrekus (Feb 1, 2019)

Cthulhux said:


> pcc was the BSD compiler until 4.4BSD which introduced the horrendous GCC instead.



*1. V5*
a nice c compiler is here in pdp unix v.5 source with some asm files.
it is very small, really.
I guess Ritchie made.

*2. FreeBSD*:
using CLANG/GCC to compile anything is kinda weird actually. Indeed.
A rewrite of Unix without its own C compiler - it is a bit like a chinese copy of supercar Ferra*l*i - without  wheels.
Likely BSD will move to another C compiler - it is anytime probable.


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## Spartrekus (Feb 1, 2019)

--


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