Mastodawn

I know that Plan9 is older than Inferno, but which is the way to go if you're getting into them today?

	Plan9
	Inferno
	wtf are you talking about?

Poll ends at Jul 1 at 11:41pm.

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requiem 🦫19h ago

I'm asking because I fell down a sort of rabbit hole reading about Golang, which I found has roots in Alef, which comes from Plan9.

So I start reading about Plan9, which leads to Inferno, and so many of the ideas I've considered and built over the years are in there. I played with both when they were new, but I didn't know enough at the time to appreciate them.

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Neal Collins 16h ago

@requiem

9front is probably your best bet. It’s an updated version of Plan9.

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sirjofri 5h ago

@requiem
I made the mistake years ago to focus on inferno, without thinking about the use case. The inferno use case tends to be like a java replacement. You'd build software (embedded or user software) and distribute that in your network. The user software most often will run as a packaged distribution on a host OS, but the end user never really touches inferno - not the OS part, and also not the desktop environment.

The inferno you probably know, the one that's distributed with the desktop, is mostly meant for the developers of said applications, as well as the engineers that manage the environment.

A good example for that is acme-sac, which is basically inferno with everything that's needed to run acme. There's no desktop GUI and acme runs in fullscreen mode.

Plan 9 on the other hand, even though it's developed as a research OS, feels like it's designed for actual daily use by "normal" users. Like, you'd run applications on it. Nowadays I'd recommend going straight to 9front, as it's more modern and comes with good new software and better hardware support, as well as better security.

Plus, you should be able to run inferno on plan 9 systems as well, even though I never tested that.

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Jared Jennings 3h ago

@sirjofri @requiem Thanks for the best explanation of Inferno's place in the scheme of things that I've seen. I had heard it was made for a (tv-)set-top box, but never figured out ... how. - To the thread, one thing to find and read about Inferno is Caerwyn's lab notebook, a series of blog articles on enhancing Inferno in various ways. There is a number of Inferno forks on Github including caerwyn's. Also I read an allegation once that Dis (the VM) was uniquely suited to 32-bit processors and unsuited to 64 bits. Not sure of the details.

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sirjofri 3h ago

@jaredj
Inferno has quite small requirements, it doesn't even need an MMU. I've heard that it can run on embedded hardware that otherwise can't run a standard multithreaded OS, though you will hit hardware limitations on those chips.

Afaik some people were working on getting 64bit inferno, but I guess that will break dis file compatibility (can't run 32bit dis binaries on a 64bit dis VM).
@requiem

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Lykso 18h ago

@requiem Inferno is more recent, but 9front is actively developed and has a fair amount of useful third party software as well. I don't know of any 9front equivalent for Inferno.

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