Lemmy uses the packages olowe.co/lemmy (source), which provides a io/fs filesystem interface to a Lemmy instance, and 9fans.net/go/acme to interact with acme. What you get is an Acme Mail inspired program for Lemmy. As you can see, it’s a work in progress!

But it’s been fun so far. Sorry that this isn’t running on Plan 9 (running on OpenBSD). I’m on the road at the moment and don’t have a way to connect to a server right now!

  • @alchemist
    3•1 year ago

    I think that anything in Plan 9 that involves a filesystem makes total sense. It’s just too easy to just make a thin layer that works with files.

    For instance, I was once building a GUI for a project in Plan 9 C, that communicated with the remote server using REST requests. All I had to do is use the webfs filesystem interface. It works somewhat like this:

    • You open /mnt/web/clone for reading and keep it open. Reading that file gives you a handle number for your connections.
    • Open /mnt/web/%d/ctl (%d being the handle number) for writing. Then you write a few textual information for your request, e.g. request get for the method, url https://my-website.com/ for URL, headers blabla for each header parameter, etc.
    • If you’re sending data, set the contenttype through the ctl file as above, then write the request body to /mnt/web/%d/postbody.
    • Open /mnt/web/%d/body for reading. This action performs the actual request, and may take some time. Nevertheless, for your program, it is simply a blocking file operation.

    I think this illustrates how simple Plan 9 can be, so I think it is possible to port most, if not every part of 9fans.net libraries to native Plan 9 by reimplementing a few functions to do file operations instead of using the plan9port binaries.