Some people like to workship whatever the UNIX founders have done, yet they miss that for Plan 9 and Inferno, they also decided to go with automatic memory management languages.
While Alef failed, Limbo's design with GC was considered a revisit from what was missing from Alef.
They also miss that lint was considered a must have tool for safer C code, introduced in 1979, and that Dennis actually proposed fat pointers to ISO, which weren't accepted.
Maybe, but when all the winning OSes share a common characteristic then you cannot simply dismiss that characteristic as irrelevant to winning without some evidence that it is not relevant.
"Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor.
Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position.
There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough."
By install count, Linux runs on far more platforms than anything else: smartphones, tablets, servers, virtual machines, embedded devices, supercomputers, and spacecraft.
They may not technically be free, but they typically come bundled with the computer you buy. Linux has yet to be shipping with free comparable computers, so the cost of Windows/MacOS is invisible to the end consumer.
While Alef failed, Limbo's design with GC was considered a revisit from what was missing from Alef.
They also miss that lint was considered a must have tool for safer C code, introduced in 1979, and that Dennis actually proposed fat pointers to ISO, which weren't accepted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alef_(programming_language)
http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/2nd_edition/papers/alef/
http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/4th_edition/limbo_language/
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/vararray.pdf