Plan 9 was a research OS that was sort of intended to be a "next generation" Unix. The Golang project is led by at least one person who worked on the Plan 9 OS, and overall it seems to be heavily inspired by Plan 9's design.
Yes, I know that. But I don't understand the implication that Go came magically from Plan 9. I recall reading Kernighan stating that the first Go compiler was written in C++ before bootstrapping.
Sorry, I misunderstood your comment. I think the original poster was referring to the Plan 9 team's strong preference for C over C++. Plan 9 was written with a modified version of C, and the developers seemed to be very interested in evolving the C language. As far as I can tell, they never used C++.
> In the presentation before the awarding of the Japan Prize today, you were quoted on the distinction between research and development. [The former, Thompson stated, was directionless, whereas development had a specific goal in mind.] So in that context, is Go experimental?
> Yes. When the three of us [Thompson, Rob Pike, and Robert Griesemer] got started, it was pure research. The three of us got together and decided that we hated C++. [laughter] [1]
It looks like you were half-right about the early Go compiler being partly written in C++: There were two compilers, and "gccgo" had a C++ front-end, while their homemade compiler "gc" was written entirely in C. [2]
