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Show HN: Go Plan9 Memo

(pehringer.info)
302 points pehringer | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | 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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mxey ◴[] No.41880731[source]
> After doing some preliminary research I discovered that Go uses its own internal assembly language called Plan9.

Is the language actually called that?

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nzach ◴[] No.41880883[source]
This is a fair question. Initially I just assumed this was true. Because someone who did research on this topic would not get something like this wrong. And besides that, if you know a little about the project this name could make some sense.

But the more I look into it, the more I think this is just a LLM hallucination.

The doc about the 'assembly' format doesn't give a proper name. It just calls 'go assembler'.

And I think the source of this hallucination was this first paragraph:

> The assembler is based on the input style of the Plan 9 assemblers, which is documented in detail elsewhere. If you plan to write assembly language, you should read that document although much of it is Plan 9-specific. The current document provides a summary of the syntax and the differences with what is explained in that document, and describes the peculiarities that apply when writing assembly code to interact with Go.

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1. jamal-kumar ◴[] No.41887486[source]
Maybe you should actually read something from the official website before spending time writing multiple paragraphs assuming it's fake. Alot of the people involved in golang also were involved in bell lab's plan9 project, going back to the 1980s (Kernighan and Pike especially go back that far). The CSP threads from plan9 were influential in the development of the programming language. And you can find this on their official site:

https://go.dev/doc/asm

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2. Thorrez ◴[] No.41887541[source]
Russ Cox (rsc), former tech lead of Go, replied above, saying the language is not called Plan9.

The link you provided doesn't say the language is called Plan9. Also, nzach quoted from that page.