On Sat, 9 Aug 2025 15:08:21 -0700, ron minnich <[email protected]> wrote: rminnich> Just a reminder, if you get too stuck in an emacs frame of mind, you're rminnich> really going to miss the full power of acme specifically, and plan 9 in rminnich> general.
For the record, I'm not advocating one or the other, just trying to work out where the dividing line is for `do it in a bunch of other processes' versus `do it in a single process'. I have a fair idea of where that line is for TOPS-20, RT-11, early Unix, and current Unices. My belief is that for Plan 9, it's about the same as for early Unix - processes are cheap, so it's better to throw lots of existing ones at a problem than to try to do more in a single one. In the early Unix case, this was at least partly driven by hardware considerations. You didn't have a lot of memory, so no single process really *could* do a lot. So make it cheap to create them, and then to chain them (as opposed to using temporary files). Plan 9 appears to have the same basic philosophy, even if the original hardware constraints no longer apply. rminnich> It's not that acme does less. It does things on an orthogonal axis to rminnich> emacs. In emacs, to get more capabilities, people tend to resort to lisp. rminnich> In acme, to get more capabilities, people resort to building tool pipelines rminnich> that *they can also use outside acme*. To me, that's very important. Emacs rminnich> solutions typically only work in emacs (true for vim and zed and on and on rminnich> ...) whereas acme can be a way to prototype things that can be used outside rminnich> acme. rminnich> rminnich> That's kind of plan 9 (to me) in a nutshell: not special purpose solutions rminnich> for single tools, but solutions that work across a wide range of tools. That's kind of separate from my original question (using it as a display engine), but equally relevant. Thanks for the perspective. Dworkin ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T9209adeaba1b3a8a-Mb2a2bcc6c51f3681891f0104 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
