plan9port VS plan9-1e

Acme is genuinely worth trying, you can run it on Linux/Mac without a VM [1]. I'm pretty sure Russ Cox [2] and Rob Pike use it as their daily driver which is insane because it doesn't even have syntax highlighting. I used it for years when I was in school as an exercise in masochism, but I learned a lot about Unix, and the mouse-driven workflow actually grew on me.

[1]: https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/

[2] https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/

If you find it too complicated and closely tied to Go internals, you can also check out Plan 9 from User Space's version, which is itself based on libthread from Plan 9 starting from 3rd edition, which is itself based on Alef's implementation of channels (Alef is Go's grandfather).

I tried plan9port's mk for a moment out of curiosity. I quickly ran into an annoying usability problem: it compares file mtimes with second accuracy.

https://github.com/9fans/plan9port/blob/cc4571fec67407652b03...

With sub-second build times for individual targets, this causes mk to needlessly recompile files because the target may have the same mtime as the prerequisites.

If you look at the Plan 9 source you can see a similar cmd convention at play in Plan 9 for grouping executable components (ok, that's 4th edition which came out after Go, but you can also see it here in this archive of the 1st edition source from 1992!