Dennis Ritchie Interviewed

An anonymous reader writes "Unix.se has published an interview with Dennis Ritchie (inventor of C, co-creator of Unix)." Not very technical, but Dennis shares his thoughts on GNU, kernel design, and more.

Comments

Re:Ritchie's Plan 9

[Binarybrain]

According to this the licensing terms of Plan 9 are unacceptable to the GNU Foundation.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/plan-nine.html

Take it as you will when you decide whether or not to support this project.

loads of things

[DrSkwid]

not easy to summarise

try reading the papers

user level file systems :
Instead of having one protocol for interrogating the disks, one for the network etc. plan9 uses the 9p protocol. In this way the physical devices are abstracted and one can use a single set of tools to inspect them. It taes the concept of Everything is a file to it's logical conclusion.
Want to know where the mouse is : cat /dev/mouse

Get slashdot homepage using the shell :

conn = `{cat /net/tcp/clone} # ( `{} is like bash's `` )

<[4] $conn { # keeps it open
echo 'connect slashdot.org!80' > /net/tcp/$conn/ctl
echo 'GET http://slashdot.org/ HTTP/1.0' > /net/tcp/$conn/data
cat /net/tcp/$conn/data
}

I wrote an irc bot as an exercise in rc. It dangerously executes given commands and returns the results

There are also other great technologies.
Incremental backups are built in.
Acme is an interactive editor that does all sorts of interesting things.

The plumber - forget file associations. The plumber uses regular expressions and executes whatever commands you would like it to for a set of given strings. So if you see http://slashdot.org in ANY piece of on-screen text, right click and select plumb and it will open it. [hehe not it plan9's web browser - that is one area seriously lacking.

The really sad part is that Lucent's financial troubles means that people have been shed from Bell-Labs. No-one is being paid to maintain plan9 any more. The heroes remaining and some outside [Rob Pike, Russ Cox, Dave Pressotto, C H Forsyth, et. al.] are doing it in their own time. And doing a great job.

I could go on but I need to leave the house. [that always seems to be the case when plan9 gets mentioned here!]

Re:What is it about his latest OS, Plan 9?

[taweili]

Plan 9 is supposed to correct what's wrong with the development Unix after Unix was "embrace and extended" by the Unix commercial vendors.

I used Plan 9 for about 9 months back in 1996. Here are some of the ideas behind it.

Everything in the system are files: This was a simple notion but powerful abstraction. Everything in the system is access through the file system API and all objects in the system have a representation in the file systems including low level network and graphics.

A per process private file name system: Plan 9 has the notion of a private file name space for each process. That means that I can create file system namespace on a individual process level.

A file system base network protocol call 9P All network services for Plan 9 are export as files to another machine.

A single sign on authentication system This has been featured a while ago. Check it out here

With these simple abstraction, you can do really cool things:

• Recursive windowing system: the framebuffer of the systme is mounted at /dev/graph (or similar name. It was a while ago). Since one can build private name space for each process, just open up a new windows, mount its graphic context at the /dev/graph and launch another copy of the windowing system in the process. The new windowing system will think the windows as the whole screen. Comes pretty handy hacking windowing system.
• Build firewall through remote file system. Say you have a machine that's on the edge with two ethernet cards and no routing enable between the two interfaces. Bascially a firewall. You can gain remote access by login into the machine, mount its /dev/eth0 to your current process's /dev/eth0 and launch browser in the process. Now, you are browsing using the firewall's external interface. This is done securely because of the private name space and single sign on. You are the only one open to the outside. The configuration of this firewall is "local" to you.

Build upon this and taking the Unix Small is Beautiful approach to problem solving. Plan 9 allows each program to perform small tasks well and provide the way to unified them together through private file name space.

Plan 9's design has a lot of impact on Linux, probably more then Linus would admit. /proc file system, process as thread, and others. These abstract can be traced back to Plan 9. Seeing those implementation on Linux (a traditional Unix clone), it become evidenced why original Unix folks like Dennis Richite wanted to start a new project to correct the mistakes of Unix. ;)

Plan 9 From Bell Labs is the Plan 9 manifesto. Good overview into the system and the rest of the documents.