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From: Roman Shaposhnik <rvs@sun.com>
Subject: gcc on plan9
Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2006 21:07:05 -0700

Ronald G Minnich wrote:
> so, end of this thread, we hope.
Well, I've writing a reply to your earlier email in a separate window, 
but except that
one (and one question which I'm saving for the end of this email) I 
think we've had enough.

The discussion helped me understand where you guys are coming from and 
why gcc is
just a means to an end for you. One question that I still have, though, 
is what
makes you think that once you're done with porting gcc (big task) and 
porting HPC apps to
gcc/Plan9 (even bigger one!) they will *execute* faster than they do on 
Linux ? Or is the
ease of building clusters (along the lines of what you've presented at 
SuperComputing in
Seattle) alone worth the trouble. Please help me understand (and feel 
free to change the
subject ;-)).

> linux nowadays is all about building a windows desktop. BORING. Or a 
> Mac OSX ripoff desktop. BORING. And just look at all that great vista 
> stuff. oh boy, I can slant my windows or something. Who the F*** cares?
  Unwashed masses, perhaps ? ;-)

> What if you had a window manager that could be recursive? that would 
> set it up so you can name windows by a path name? that would let you 
> treat the recursive desktops -- to any level -- as just another 
> window? that would trivially allow you to connect mouse clicks in a 
> window to control actions for one or more other windows (i.e. you 
> could logically group windows and then control all of them via mouse 
> clicks)? That would maybe let you easily connect output from a process 
> in one window to another? that would let you build little widgets 
> that  could easily control other windows? That would let you display 
> all window state in another window? That would let you set, say, all 
> windows with a browser with the label abaco-### (### a number), with a 
> simple text command; and let you find all windows with the label 
> abaco.* with, in the limit, a grep? That would make it easy to group 
> all windows with the label 'abaco.*' so that you could say 'hide all 
> abaco' with a simple script?
>
> Wouldn't that be neat? I mean, that's a real bitch in X, right?
>
> Except ... you already have it.
  You're absolutely onto something here, Ron! In fact, if everything 
goes right, I really want to explore
a possibility of building a clean desktop (don't laugh yet!) on top of 
Plan9. I really think that what Nemo
has been doing with building UIs is quite convincing and has lots of 
potential. But I have to start at
even lower level, making "/dev/draw" do all the basic things I care 
about in a desktop.

Will see where it goes, but one thing for sure -- I'll be asking lots of 
questions in this forum ;-)

Thanks,
Roman.