Go: Why I ♥ Google

November 11, 2009 By Anant in FOSS, Google, Mozilla, People, Plan9, Programming, Technology Leave a comment

Christmas came early this year.

Glenda2Go

Today, Google announced their new open source systems programming language: Go. I’m super excited about this, we all have been wondering what Rob Pike has been upto since he joined the big G, and now we know. Not just that, but Ken Thomson, Robert Griesemer, Ian Taylor and Russ Cox were all involved in the project, with Ken doing what he does best, writing compilers in lightning speed If that isn’t a list of heavyweight respectable computer scientists, I don’t know what is!

I think Go is poised to be the dominant systems programming language of the future. Go has nailed almost every aspect of a systems language, though some would say I’m biased. Go has been strongly influenced by Oberon, CSP languages like Limbo, and the standard libraries have tantalizing similarities to Plan 9. We’ve had Limbo and Plan 9 for a while now (more than a decade), but this is where my real love for Google begins to bubble, they took something awesome but unpopular and gave it a push to the masses. There are very few companies in the world who would attract the talent to do this, and even fewer who would open source the results. The attention Go has been getting is just mind blowing. Pike had been doing amazing work at Bell-Labs for quite a while, but none of it even got an inkling of the publicity Go is currently getting.

Google was what Pike needed to prove Utah2000 wrong.

I know one thing for sure, I’ll definitely be using my Plan 9 virtual machine a lot less; now that I can write clean concurrent programs that don’t make my head hurt, both in Linux and OS X. And GCC, I’m not shedding any tears while I bid you goodbye.

On another note, Google also announced today that they’ll be sponsoring free WiFi at a whole bunch of US airports this holiday season. For all its faults, Google definitely seems to be doing the right thing. For how long, it remains to be seen, but so far I’d say their track record has been better than excellent.

UPDATE: John Gruber points out that “judging from the copyright statements, [Go is] not an official Google project”. Could this be a result of the famous 20% time scheme?

GSoC Mentor Summit ’09 Roundup

November 1, 2009 By Anant in FOSS, Fun, Gentoo, Google, Mozilla, People, Photos, Plan9, SoC 1 Comment

The grand Summer of Code Mentor Summit of 2009 concluded last week and I had the fantastic opportunity of being able to attend on behalf of Gentoo, Plan 9 and Mozilla. What follows is some indication of how awesome the summit was:

(Photo courtesy of warthog from Etherboot)

I met so many folks I’d only interacted with online so far (the classic nickname-to-face matching), but even better was the opportunity to meet folks powering open source projects from so many diverse backgrounds. I met many of my personal rockstars, and learned about a bunch of open source projects I’d never heard of

Also, one of the things that is only possible at an event like the summit was the ability to get a whole bunch of non-linux operating system groups in one room. We had a great discussion, and it resulted in the creation of the “rosetta-os” special interest group. Look for more activity on the common device drivers for non-linux operating systems front soon!

Other sessions worthy of special mention were Open Source Security, Recruiting and Retaining Awesome People, Advanced Trolling (yes, you read that right), and of course the always welcoming Casablanca where I spent most of my time. We discussed everything from our SoC experiences to the Afro Celt Sound System in that room, always full of creative energy and warmth.

After 4 years of participating in the Summer of Code, I am super happy to have finally met the faces behind the program. Every single person I met over the course of last weekend was friendly, intelligent and just generally awesome; that sort of thing doesn’t happen by chance. I feel warm and fuzzy inside to think that I’m actually a part of the revolution that is free and open source software, three cheers to everyone that made it possible!

The Summer of Code is here again!

March 23, 2009 By Anant in FOSS, Gentoo, Glendix, Google, Mozilla, Plan9, Programming, SoC, Technology Leave a comment

It’s that time of the year. Google is, yet again, sponsoring students to write some awesome open source code this summer. If you’re a student, and you’d like to make some money contributing to some of the most well known and exciting open source software projects out there, you’d be missing out on a lot by not applying.

If you’re wondering about what the best way to get started is, check out this great advice page. All projects have also been tagged by programming language and field in this delicious profile. You can also search for ideas here.

I’m going to be mentoring for Mozilla, Glendix (under the Plan 9 Umbrella) and Gentoo this year. Get in touch if you’re interested in any of those ideas

The window for applications opens in a few hours. Good luck everyone!

FOSS.IN/08: Summary

November 30, 2008 By Anant in Conferences, FOSS, FOSS.IN, Gentoo, Glendix, Hacks, Mozilla, People, Plan9, Programming 2 Comments

As a developer, I have to say that FOSS.IN/08 is possibly the most productive conference I’ve been to until now! In just 5 days, I’ve got more things done than I have in the last 5 months

Let’s start with the Beacon workout: Nandeep joined us via VoIP and we got started almost immediately, thanks to the dynamic nature and small size of our project – we didn’t have any infrastructural trouble as a few other C/C++ projects with huge codebases and complex build systems did. We had a list of 6 tasks in mind, and we managed to complete 3 of them. Salil Kothadia got started with writing a PDO data backend, and promptly submitted the patch to us next day. Thanks Salil, hope you continue to contribute to the development of Beacon (thereby increasing the development team size by 25%)!

I also attended Philip’s workout on porting HTML::Template to Javascript. As mentioned on the Wiki page, we mostly worked on the design during the first half or so, and then moved on to writing a skeleton for the whole framework. I think this is an extremely interesting project, and am very happy to be associated with its birth. Hope we can continue the momentum and work until it is finished.

Perhaps the biggest take-away from the conference for me was the ability to give a lightning talk about Glendix, with several kernel hackers present in the audience. Christoph then kindly offered to review some of the patches during the workout. Even the possibility of Plan 9 binary emulation being considered for inclusion into the main kernel tree is amazing, let alone the fact that I got the guidance of an experienced kernel hacker for a good 2 hours! I think the effort was largely successful – I now have a better idea of what I need to do in order to get a kernel patch in order, and also got a few hints as to how I can implement the missing bits.

My primary focus at the conference was to give a talk on Mozilla Labs and Innovation. I think I managed to stir up a decent amount of interest in the various Labs initiatives. I covered the different ways in which members of the community can contribute, specifically focussing on Weave, Ubiquity and the Concept Series. We even covered how easy it is to actually write an Ubiquity command. I now look forward to increased participation by the Indian Mozilla community in Labs projects. Don’t forget to thank Mary for all the goodies!

All this, apart from regular conference happenings like catching up with old friends, making new ones and free swag (great mugs and t-shirts this time around) makes FOSS.IN/08 one of the most successful conferences I’ve been to so far! I can’t wait for the 2009 edition

Glendix on the Web!

November 27, 2008 By Anant in Conferences, FOSS, FOSS.IN, Glendix, Linux, People, Plan9, Programming 1 Comment

Glendix has been making the rounds on the web lately, with coverage from OSNews, Reddit, and even a Russian site, Linux.org.ru. It’s really motivating to see some buzz around the project, giving me the extra boost needed to push the completion of a usable release!

Some of the major obstacles that have to be crossed before making a beta-quality release are the completion of critical synthetic filesystems – especially /net and /draw. We also have to work out the kinks with per-process namespaces and union mounts. I don’t know if we’ll be able to get Rio running as a WM before an official release; if not, Plan9Port‘s Rio and WMII are good candidates.

The biggest criticism of Glendix seems to be the reasoning that Plan9 user-space tools are somehow superior to their GNU counterparts, and several people have asked us to substantiate our claims. At this point, however, I don’t think that it is really important, or even relevant. Even if Plan9 user-space tools aren’t somehow better – I think it is generally a refreshing idea to see Linux combined with a user-space other than GNU.

We’re at FOSS.IN this year, where a large number of kernel developers have gathered; and I hope to get some of their valuable input on the problems Glendix currently faces, and maybe even write some code to solve them

Thanks for all the community support and critical comments, they are all very vital feedback for the project and are much appreciated!

FOSS.IN 08: Mozilla Labs, Beacon and Glendix

November 24, 2008 By Anant in Conferences, FOSS, FOSS.IN, India, Linux, Mozilla, People, Plan9, Programming Leave a comment

FOSS.IN 2008 begins tomorrow!

It’s going to be really interesting to see how the departure from the ‘07 formula works out.

I’ll be conducting a Workout on Beacon, the web-based GuideXML editor on Day 4 (Friday). If you’re interested in contributing to a next generation AJAX powered web application and are familiar with Javascript with a bit of PHP or Python, I highly recommend dropping in!

There will also be a talk on Innovation and Mozilla Labs on Day 5 (Saturday), where we’ll take Weave as a case-study to see how ideas are incubated at the Labs. I’ll be talking about how you can contribute to the various initatives at Mozilla Labs. Or maybe you’re just curious about the future of the web and how you can help shape it. In any case, you want to be there (*hint* there will be goodies *hint*)!

Two Glendix hackers, myself and Shantanu are also going to be at the event, and there’s a whole day dedicated to Linux kernel hacking. I’m planning a lightning talk on Glendix during the gathering, and hopefully we can gather enough interest to get some work done on some of the project’s priorities!

See you at India’s largest FOSS event :-)

Binary Sunrise

Anant Narayanan

Category Archives: Plan9