[TUHS] Plan 9 C compilers for Linux/mac/windows

[Arnold Robbins via TUHS]

This may be of interest to this crowd.  NOTE that this is NOT
my work, I am simply passing the info on.

Arnold

> From: yoann.padioleau at gmail.com
> To: 9fans <9fans at 9fans.net>
> Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2026 16:24:08 -0400
> Subject: [9fans] Goken9cc update, support for Linux, macOS, windows and 11
>  archs!
>
> This is an update for the Goken9cc project I've announced a few months
> ago on 9fans (and presented at IWP9): https://github.com/aryx/goken9cc
>
> To summarize: goken9cc is a portable, multi-architecture toolchain — C
> compilers, assemblers, and linkers — together with a minimalist C
> library, rooted in Ken Thompson's legendary work on the Plan 9 and
> Inferno operating systems. First extended by Go developers, this
> toolchain now brings cross-platform support for Linux, macOS, and
> Windows while preserving the simplicity, elegance, and efficiency of
> the original Plan 9 tools.
>
> In the future work section of my talk I was talking about the
> support to produce Linux ELF binaries, macOS Mach-O binaries,
> and windows PE binaries and it's now all working!
>
> There is also a multiplatform libc similar to the original Plan 9 libc
> that can work on 11 architectures (i386, amd64, arm, arm64, riscv32, riscv64,
> mips, powerpc, sparc, alpha, m68k) across 4 operating systems (Linux,
> darwin, windows, plan9, with xv6 in the work).
>
> We can now even bootstrap goken using goken, that is using it to compile
> itself on Linux, macOS, and windows (and we can still bootstrap it
> using gcc and clang, the original goal of goken9cc).
>
> The included multiplatform libc is pretty complete as it
> can be used to compile goken itself which contains not only the toolchain
> but also the code of mk, rc, as well as many Plan 9 utilities.
>
> My plan now is to add a multiplatform libdraw to also produce
> Linux, macOS, and windows binaries using graphics (relying on
> Russ cox port of libdraw in plan9port and in drawterm).
>
> Happy to answer questions or requests for the project.
>
> PS: the code of goken is synced with my other principia softwarica project
> so the code of goken is also fully explain in the principia books
> at https://principia-softwarica.org/
>
>
> AI disclaimer:
> 95% of the code in goken9cc was written by humans (mostly Ken
> Thompson, Rob Pike, Charles Forsyth, Richard Miller, and other Plan 9
> contributors), and for the most part written more than 30 years
> ago. What I did was essentially to package those old toolchains
> together and then use AI to write the remaining 5% so that the
> toolchains could work not just on Plan 9 for Plan 9 but also on and
> for Linux, macOS, and Windows (imitating for the most part what was
> done by Go developers for the Go language).
>
> All the clerical work of finding the right syscall numbers for each
> architecture and operating systems for the multiplatform C library in
> goken9cc (see lib_core/libc/{arch,syscall,os}) was done by Claude
> Code, inspired by what Go developers did for Go (see the
> GO/pkg/{syscall,runtime} directories).
>
> Most of the code written by AI is clearly marked with a special
> claude: comment at the front and part of a commit authored by Claude
> code. You can use the scripts/ai_percentage.py to get authorship LOC
> statistics across the different directories in goken9cc.
>
> ------------------------------------------
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