Revisit Plan9
I was surfing the web as usual at yesterday morning, trying
looking something that was cool. The first thing I do was to
install clisp on FreeBSD, and I found what I want. The
installation was a little anonying. Because I want clisp to
support raw socket, and the package distributed with 6.0-release
does not support it. Then I grab clisp-2.8, which distributed with
6.1-release, and installed it, left two warning messages to me. I
think FreeBSD's package rule was very strict.
The last thing I want to find is whether there is a portable
Common Lisp thread library. So I do a web search, somehow I
reached a page written by Russ Cox. His summation about thread is
different from the threading model which I know of. In fact, I
think that kind of threading model can only lie in a functional
programming language, such as ML. But I was wrong. The developers
on Plan9 implement a C threading library demostrating its
strength, and most importantly, its elegence. As a matter of fact,
it is elegance that attracts me to look a little further.
The rest are not worth mentioning. The result is: I sit before
a computer for a whole day, gathering documents about Plan9, and
its deveolpers' personal homepages, and I found a lot of cool
stuff. A little history that makes me write this down is: when I
was a undergraduate student of applied mathematics major, I was
already known of Plan9, and I have a copy of bziped Plan9
distribution CD at that time. That was at 2003. Almost three years
later, at 2006/10/13, I redo the same whole process again. Some
documents I read yesterday were the very same ones I read three
years ago. Pretty sad, I do not make any progression at all during
these three years.
