Hello. I'm the guy that funded the amd64 port of the Ken C compilers (later used by the Go team) and amd64 port for Plan 9, did the Xen 2 and lguest ports of Plan 9, wrote the first 9p file system implementation for Linux, and ran the project that ported Plan 9 to 3 generations of the Blue Gene supercomputer (to name a few Plan 9 things). I wanted to make a few comments about Harvey since it came up here.
C compiler: yes, years ago, Ken C was faster than alternatives like gcc. To my surprise, that's no longer true. A full build of all the plan 9 libraries, tools, and kernels takes about 2-3 minutes with ken c, gcc, and clang. It's why on every push to github we can do a full build with both gcc and clang using travis. There's no longer a good reason to stick with the Plan 9 C compiler and, once the Go team dropped it too, there were lots of good reasons to move away from it. So we did. As the original paper from Ken pointed out, it only ever produced medium quality code. It also had several bugs with 64-bit scalars that people had to work around in their C code. It was fast but in the end not a very good compiler.
Unix wrinkles: there are so many, but just consider the sockets interface. Sockets completely break the Unix model of named entities that you can open and close and read and write. Sockets don't have names and are not visible in the file system. It's a long list of what they got wrong and that's why, in 1978, other mechanisms were proposed (if you're willing to dig you can find the RFC and you'll see ideas like /dev/tcp/hostname and so on). But to our dismay (I was there at the time) the current BSD socket interface won. Many of us were disappointed by that decision but it was the fastest way to get network support into Unix.
On the acceptance of Harvey: Presotto and Hume showed up for our BOF at the 2015 Usenix in Santa Clara and were very supportive of what we are doing with Harvey. Other former members of the Bell Labs community have been similarly supportive.
On the logo: I'm glad people like it.
On the way forward: we welcome new contributors, there's lots of work to do.
w.r.t. the speed comment. The Plan 9 C compiler (which I've used for 20 years) no longer has any speed advantage over, e.g., clang. And the code it produces is not very good. Time to move on.
C compiler: yes, years ago, Ken C was faster than alternatives like gcc. To my surprise, that's no longer true. A full build of all the plan 9 libraries, tools, and kernels takes about 2-3 minutes with ken c, gcc, and clang. It's why on every push to github we can do a full build with both gcc and clang using travis. There's no longer a good reason to stick with the Plan 9 C compiler and, once the Go team dropped it too, there were lots of good reasons to move away from it. So we did. As the original paper from Ken pointed out, it only ever produced medium quality code. It also had several bugs with 64-bit scalars that people had to work around in their C code. It was fast but in the end not a very good compiler.
Unix wrinkles: there are so many, but just consider the sockets interface. Sockets completely break the Unix model of named entities that you can open and close and read and write. Sockets don't have names and are not visible in the file system. It's a long list of what they got wrong and that's why, in 1978, other mechanisms were proposed (if you're willing to dig you can find the RFC and you'll see ideas like /dev/tcp/hostname and so on). But to our dismay (I was there at the time) the current BSD socket interface won. Many of us were disappointed by that decision but it was the fastest way to get network support into Unix.
On the acceptance of Harvey: Presotto and Hume showed up for our BOF at the 2015 Usenix in Santa Clara and were very supportive of what we are doing with Harvey. Other former members of the Bell Labs community have been similarly supportive.
On the logo: I'm glad people like it.
On the way forward: we welcome new contributors, there's lots of work to do.