Plan 9 or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love UNIX

01 Apr 2011 | gnufs

I’ve been interested in Plan 9 for some time now, though never tinkered with it in a significant depth. It may not be the most practical OS for daily activities, but it always sounded like a system worth studying for all the groundbreaking concepts it introduces and eventually gets adapted by other system. But I haven’t really expected it to be so much simple in source form. After all, it’s a research system; it should be full of incomprehensible coding trickeries, right?

Okay, that was obviously a trick question. But here is what’s made me really interested in Plan 9: Having a first glance in the source code of the cat utility and comparing it with what I’m running on my computer.

apt-get source 9base coreutils && emacs 9base*/cat/cat.c coreutils*/src/cat.c

Elegance and simplicity do go hand in hand.

Now, I have a new reason to learn the ways of Plan 9.