Students write Plan 9 based operating system with Googles Go

A research team from the Spanish university Rey Juan Carlos is working on a new operating system based on Plan 9 and partly written in Go, Google’s young programming language.

The students of the LSUB team announced the brand new operating system Clive Friday. Their goal is to revive Bell Labs’ “beloved” Plan 9 while leveraging software stacks written in Go. Clive is written in the traditional C and open source programming language Go, which was introduced by Google in 2009 and is very similar in syntax to C. Go is supposed to offer a simpler alternative to complex programming languages ​​and offers the possibility to run multiple processes simultaneously. fed by means of so-called ‘goroutines’. The students mainly want to use Clive for cloud applications. Clive works with the ZX file system, which is derived from an unknown UNIX file system. The OS runs on a modified Nix kernel, previously developed by the university, and uses parts of Bell Labs’ Plan 9. This system is derived from Unix and has a microkernel. Plan 9 can simulate a POSIX environment, allowing Unix applications to be ported to the system. The operating system was made open source in 2000.