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If you want to explore more OSes that look like this, [Fuschia](https://fuchsia.dev/) is a good one to look at. Rather than having a file be the core primitive, it has an "actor" as the core primitive. And processes send messages to these actors to do anything.

Interestingly, Plan9 started moving in this direction in their later papers. They'd walk through all the many different file operations you'd need to get something accomplished, and then say "but we made a library which does all these things, so you don't need to do it yourself," which kinda defeats the purpose of having everything be a file--and brings you toward the Fuchsia approach.




What can you do with Fuschia today? I'd imagine that it's not usable as a mobile OS or a desktop OS.


Google released some Fuschia powered smart home devices. I believe that’s roughly the extent of its deployment thus far.


That's roughly the extent of interest in fuchsia within Google itself.


It was supposed to be used instead of one of android versions (to simplify future updates and disconnect them from manufacturers and cell operators) but it didn’t happened…


Good for getting your system pwned, more CVEs than I can count!

Big shame though, really love the idea behind it :/


You can type a command and if the application is missing it will install it on the fly and the command will just work.

I wish Linux distros had this feature as well.


Something like command-not-found is as good as it gets. Because you don't want to run an arbitrary program based on user input. You want to be able to know beforehand which program is going to run. Which you specifically cannot be sure of when you make a typo (and you don't know beforehand that you make a typo).

Its why rm evokes -i by default and requires -f to avoid interaction on some OSes. Users can and will make a mistake with it, especially new users. And everyone makes typos.


I am using tea (brew's creator multi-platform successor) and you can set it up so if a command is missing it will install it.

As you say, it's a bit scary that any typo can install random commands lol

I already installed several 1 character langauges by mistake

$ v == https://vlang.io/


The final form of typosquatting attack vectors.


They do. I disable it always because it is annoying if you typo a command.


I imagine sl would be even more annoying if you had to download it.


If the download and installation is fast enough, it feels smooth, and not annoying.

If a distro were to appear with this feature enabled by default, I hope they would have the foresight to not include "sl", or at least put it in the default blacklist.


The big problems with Fuchsia is that i work with files.


> in their later papers

Can you point out which ones? I thought I was pretty familiar with the Plan 9 papers but don't remember that part. Or maybe I just missed it?


How "alive" is the Fuchsia project today?


Deep 6




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