DOS ain't dead

is Plan9 better than UNIX? (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo , Usono, 23.02.2026, 20:45

Despite the immense popularity of "UNIX", I find that a lot of *nix code is, shall we say, not really portable, and it tends to get too complex and narrow. This is to the point that it barely works on GNU/Linux, much less anything else (ahem, DJGPP, who always loses working support in newer versions). Linux devs tend to view Linux itself as superior, so portability to other OSes seems an afterthought.

Is Plan9 better? It was designed at Bell Labs to be simpler, cleaner, better. Although I admit it may not do everything that Linux does, but it claims to not need some popular things, such as:

* root
* curses
* symlinks
* pthreads
* mmap
* dynamic linking
* locales
* gcc
* C++
* emacs or vi
* X11

It's just almost shocking to me, considering how rigid modern Linux devs are, that anybody would omit those things. Linux isn't bad, far from it (albeit imperfect), but perhaps there's more than one way to do things. Maybe "POSIX" isn't the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Just a random example (which should surprise no one): Moria was written in VAX Pascal in the early '80s but later converted to C. Just to quote Wikipedia

> As C was a much more portable programming language than VMS Pascal,
> there was an explosion of Moria ports for a variety of different
> computer systems such as MS-DOS, Amiga, Atari ST and Apple IIGS.

And to quote the modern Github:

> Supported Platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux (Ubuntu/Debian)
> Compiling and limited testing has been done for other Linux
> based system including NetBSD 8.1 [sic] and Fedora 32.
>
> The main focus of the 5.7.0 release was to provide support
> for the three main operating systems: Windows, macOS, and Linux.
> Support for all other outdated computer systems such as MS DOS,
> "Classic" Mac OS (pre OSX), Amiga, and Atari ST was removed.

You'll say "well obviously!" or "just use old versions!" or "time is money" or "devs can do whatever they want!".

But, strictly speaking, this isn't very portable anymore. Source compatibility gets narrower and narrower. People only see "Windows or POSIX [Linux / Mac]", if even that much, and only super-latest versions (usually preferring AMD64 and maybe ARM64).

Just saying, maybe relying on a POSIX shell to ./configure for Windows (or OS/2 or DOS), which lacks fork(), is a bad idea. I'm not sure preferring CMake or GNU Make is better either. (Also, there's too much GCC reliance with a constant churn of extensions.)

No, I didn't try to rebuild this project, it's just a random example of modern "portability". There are old DOS ports of it.

(This is not really a rant, but I find most software is a mess that is hard to rebuild, much less understand. But even giving someone a cross compiler or emulator with FreeDOS isn't enough these days. C or C++ is so great and portable until it isn't.)

Complete thread:

• is Plan9 better than UNIX? - Rugxulo, 23.02.2026, 20:45 (Developers)
  • is Plan9 better than UNIX? - samwdpckr, 08.04.2026, 01:59
  • is Plan9 better than UNIX? - kerravon, 11.04.2026, 15:05
    • is Plan9 better than UNIX? - Rugxulo, 14.04.2026, 10:08