> This depends a lot on the user. In the right hands it's extremely efficient.
IMO the inefficiency is more due to the fundamental brokenness of the Unix process model. A Unix process is sort of like a VM with none of the security, and all of the stuff that has been added to it over the years (signals, IPC, dynamic linking) just makes it worse and worse. Things like full machine virtualization and now over the past 15 years namespaces/cgroups/containers are very complicated, brittle ways of trying to work around the shortcomings of Unix processes. This IMO is the biggest advance plan9 made over Unix.
IMO the inefficiency is more due to the fundamental brokenness of the Unix process model. A Unix process is sort of like a VM with none of the security, and all of the stuff that has been added to it over the years (signals, IPC, dynamic linking) just makes it worse and worse. Things like full machine virtualization and now over the past 15 years namespaces/cgroups/containers are very complicated, brittle ways of trying to work around the shortcomings of Unix processes. This IMO is the biggest advance plan9 made over Unix.