Nice! I hope they publish their work. plan9 is a great and very portable OS for experimenting with new architectures, for the reasons outlined in the slides. You can cross-compile the entire OS for a foreign architecture by simply setting objtype=arm and running mk (plan9's take on make) - less than 5 minutes later the whole OS is done compiling.
It took a minute to compile plan9 kernel from scratch on the original raspberry pi (running plan9). You can even cross compile a x86 kernel in similar time. 10 seconds in 9vx emulator running on FreeBSD/amd64. I don’t recall the details now but a from-scratch Linux kernel compile was 10 or 11 hours (under Linux on the same raspberry pi). Thank goodness it wasn’t written in C++; the compile time would’ve been so much worse!
C compiler optimizations seems like micro-optimizations when people should be looking at the bloat elsewhere. Missing the forest for the trees.
C is basically a low level language. A portable assembly language. A predictable compiler shouldn’t second guess the programmer’s intent. To put things in perspective, if all the man-years spent on gcc were spent on GNU Hurd... :-)
I compiled linux on the raspberry pi just for kicks! Most people don't recompile the kernel so it doesn't matter but this just goes to show how misguided our blind quest for micro-performance has been.
This is even the officially-documented way to turn your 32-bit 9front install into a 64-bit 9front install, IIRC from doing this exact thing when I installed 9front on an old laptop of mine.
