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CoroutinesCoroutinesPosted May 8, 2012 19:07 UTC (Tue) by wahern (subscriber, #37304)In reply to: Coroutines by juliank Parent article: nPth - The new GNU portable threads library
Go is based on Limbo, not Plan 9. It's like the difference between Awk and Unix. I mention it because Plan 9 was influential is so many other ways. The recent C11 standard has many features which originated (I believe) with Plan 9's C extensions. UTF-8 was first used in Plan 9. Modern /proc, I believe, is descended from Plan 9. And nothing about Plan 9 dictates or even strongly suggests a message-based multi-threaded language design.
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Coroutines Posted May 8, 2012 19:37 UTC (Tue) by juliank (subscriber, #45896) [Link]
I'd say that Go is actually closer to Alef then Limbo. And it really is Plan 9 derived in some way. Not only the languages such as Alef, and later Limbo, but there's also a C library called libtask that implements the channel/thread mechanism (using user threads, Plan 9 doesn't seem to do kernel threads).
Coroutines Posted May 8, 2012 20:18 UTC (Tue) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link]
The design behind Plan 9 predates both Alef and the threading library. Lots of fruitful things were developed on Plan 9, and some folded back into the low-level systems. libtask was developed for Alef and only made available to run-of-the-mill C application later. According to Wikipedia, Plan 9 began in the mid '80s, and libtask was folded into the mix in 2000, two years before the project officially ended.
Limbo succeeded Alef, and Go seems to have succeeded Limbo. But I'll admit this is all just largely opinion.
But more to the point, Plan 9 never touted intraprocess message passing. If you read any of the papers, when they talked about parallelism they spoke about their rfork() system call (which may have inspired Linux' clone syscall; OpenBSD's rfork is clearly derivative of Plan 9). Alef, and later Limbo, was where all the experimentation into messaging passing went, and I think my comparison to Awk v. Unix is apt. To see where I'm coming from, just read their own description and emphasis: http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html
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