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Show HN: Go Plan9 Memo

(pehringer.info)
302 points pehringer | 3 comments | 18 Oct 24 14:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.611s | source

A quick dive into the Plan9 assembly I picked up while developing my SIMD package for Go, and how it led to a 450% performance boost in calculations.
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rob74 ◴[18 Oct 24 15:23 UTC] No.41880278[source]▶
In case it's not obvious, the "Plan 9" in the Go Assembler's name comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs, and the reason for that is of course that two of the "Go founders" (Rob Pike and Ken Thompson) are Bell Labs alumni. Some more background on the Go assembler: https://go.dev/doc/asm
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colechristensen ◴[18 Oct 24 15:31 UTC] No.41880349[source]▶
The same people used the same name for two computer related projects.

That's certainly an ... interesting choice.

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lloeki ◴[18 Oct 24 15:46 UTC] No.41880498[source]▶
It is, essentially, the same project. Plan9 is the umbrella term for the whole operating system.

https://plan9.io/sys/doc/comp.html

IIRC before Go was self compiling, it was compiled using 9c, and its architecture inherits from 9c.

EDIT: some nearby threads got the details better!

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1. floren ◴[18 Oct 24 15:57 UTC] No.41880609[source]▶
> IIRC before Go was self compiling, it was compiled using 9c, and its architecture inherits from 9c.

Back in those days I actually found that, with a few small tweaks, I could compile the Plan 9 operating system using Go's C suite. We didn't pursue it further but this was one of the options we looked into for cross-compiling Plan 9 from other operating systems.

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2. stonogo ◴[18 Oct 24 16:48 UTC] No.41881173[source]▶
Since to Go C suite was ported Plan 9 compilers, I'm not sure why this would be a surprise. Since I'm obviously missing something would you share your thoughts on what challenges you expected?
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3. floren ◴[18 Oct 24 17:20 UTC] No.41881498[source]▶
It wasn't any surprise, nor did I intend to imply it was surprising, just relaying an anecdote. There were a few differences that required small tweaks to the source, but we got the Plan 9 kernel compiled with the Go C compilers in a day.