

Ask HN: Comparing QNX and Plan 9 for system development? - wrp

Can anyone compare the benefits or difficulties of self-hosted development on QNX Neutrino and Plan 9? I'm looking for an alternative to Linux that would make life easier by having cleaner structure, direct support for distributed processing, and a microkernel architecture to simplify driver development.<p>The project is a non-commercial/open distributed system (both in the senses of multi-processor and peer-to-peer) on x86 platforms, with no realtime requirement.<p>From looking briefly at both and reading the docs, my impression is that Plan 9 has a more elegant design and frendlier license/community, while QNX has a more developed environment. The tradeoffs give them about even appeal for me, so I'd like to know how they fare as you get deep into a project with them.<p>Tell me if I'm wrong, but of the alternatives, Amoeba looks very awkward, Chorus seems completely dead and gone, and GNU/Hurd, MINIX 3, and Genode look far from ready to be used in anger.
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stonemetal
QNX is going to have better hardware support, plan 9 seems more interesting
from a distributed system point of view. Why not the plan 9 follow on,
Inferno? It comes with a VM for other oses so you could get linux or windows
contributors.

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wrp
The portability of Inferno is really impressive, but from what I can tell, you
are limited to using the Limbo language for it. I also haven't found any
discussion of how easy it is to port Unix tools to Inferno. Is it more
difficult than porting to Plan 9?

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stonemetal
That I am not sure. From what I have read they claim to have spent about 90%
of their time on the project making it unix compatible. How easy they made it
to port I don't know.

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russell
I did a port of a word processor to QNX 25 years ago, so that makes it old as
the hills and the system calls must have been Unix compliant. Other than that
I dont remember much. Plan 9 is of similar vintage. Even Linux is newer.

