Dear Netsurf developers,
I have started a port of Netsurf 3.9 to the operating system Plan 9 (http://9front.org, https://9p.io/plan9). It uses the framebuffer frontend for now, but I plan to continue with a native frontend, also possibly with help from other developers.
I have got to the point where it is possible to run the browser, load local pages from the file system, click on buttons and links. Several components requiring external libraries are still missing, like image support, fetching pages from the network etc.
Plan 9 could be considered a "Unix like" OS, especially as it originally was written by much the same authors as did write Unix. It is, however, in it self not Posix compliant at the system-call level. My port uses the Posix emulation layer APE (http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape) in order to compile the Netsurf sources. APE does not provide complete Posix support, especially not features added in recent years, but given the size of the source code of Netsurf (which is big compared to most Plan 9 software) things have gone surprisingly well, which is indeed a testament to the quality of the Netsurf source. Another obstacle is that most larger GNU development tools aren't available for Plan 9, no GCC for example. Plan 9 has its own C compiler (https://9p.io/sys/doc/compiler.html) that sometimes does things in different ways, and typically doesn't support GCC extensions and newer features added to the language lately.
In the absence of GCC/Autotools/GNUmake and friends, I have written my own build system using Plan 9 'mk' (using 'mkfile'). I am aware that this makes a possible upstream integration of the port harder. Alternative routes would have been making GCC work on plan 9---some work has been done on this (https://harvey-os.org), or to try to generate plan 9 binaries from Linux using cross compilation. Both ways would be a lot of compiler development work, and I am quite sure that the plan 9 community would rather prefer something that will compile on the platform itself (as is with the current port beginning). Even though plan 9 is a bit of a minimalistic OS with modest hardware requirements, it runs on contemporary hardware (32-bit and 64-bit PC:s as well as Raspberry PI:s), so a middle layer between the source and the system API is not that of a big burden, especially as Netsurf is a lightweight browser, compared to the giants. In the Plan 9 world, simplicity and clarity is praised over premature optimisation, and it is my impression that the same holds for the Netsurf project to a large extent.
Anyhow, there is quite an excitement in the 9front crowd about the possibility to have modern, yet well written and non-bloated, web browser available on the platform. The existing browsers: Mothra (http://man.9front.org/1/mothra) and Abaco (https://9p.io/sources/contrib/fgb/abaco.pdf) are usable for many things, but does not support CSS and other modern features of the web. The browsers present do however support 'https' trough the use of plan 9's own web content fetcher: Webfs (http://man.9front.org/4/webfs). The plan 9 user base almost entirely consists of programmers who uses plan 9 as their preferred development platform, mostly as a personal and hobby system.
So far the port resides on my plan 9 file server at home, and I upload it here (http://webbkurs.ei.hv.se/~imjam/plan9/). Now when I managed to get it going, I am thinking of hosting it in a repository for easier collaboration. Of course, it would be really cool if the Plan 9 port in the future would be part of the official Netsurf project in some way, which also would make it easier to keep up with new releases.
I started with the source tree of Netsurf 3.9, downloading all all support libraries separately (that is why they have version numbers in the directories). I have not deleted any files, only added files and changed files. All files 'xxx.y' that I changed are backed up as 'orig_xxx.y' making it easier to 'diff' against the original. I got the tip that it might be a good idea to make a clone of the official Git repository and applying the diffs against it, in which case the 'orig_' files won't be necessary, and a possible merger maybe easier to do in the future. Some of auto-generated files (e.g. by perl scripts) are copied over from Linux build directory, to reduce the number of external tools used during the compilation (and Plan 9 does not have all of them).
I am interested in all kinds of feedback on the project, especially regarding what you think about the the not so standard build system, and if/how you would think merging into the official repository could be done in the future.
I've recorded a 14 minutes long video showing how I compile and run netsurf on 9front. Be aware that the GUI is very slow, which is most likely because my framebuffer driver copies the whole window bitmap for every change, and that the window output is sent to my Mac where I use Quicktime to record. Running the browser directly on a 9front computer is much snappier. Also, I expect remoteing the window to another computer to work much better with a native frontend.
Streaming version of the video: (https://hvplay.hv.se/media/t/0_6uyp5hck)
Just the .mov file (168MB) (https://webbkurs.ei.hv.se/~imjam/plan9/netsurf_on_plan9.mov)
All the best, thank you for making Netsurf, and happy new year!
Jonas Amoson
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