> do you envision a system with no shell at all? I haven't thought about a system, but as I was going through a similar exercise I decided that instead of copying the code I would put on my go hat on and implement from scratch with whatever tools go gave me. Freq for example uses the standard hashmap. Cmp, comm and uniq spawn readers that concurrently gobble up the inputs while a state machine implements the logic via select{} on channels. I can see those willing to build a system out of this leveraging go's fast compilation and distribute only a shell and compiler+linker, but I can't speak for them.
Of course, the benefits of such a rewrite for the sake of "re-imagination" are only marginal in most cases because the Plan 9 programs are very well thought-out high quality code. I just don't want to see it blindly rewritten without any thought put into it. Or, rather, don't want to do it myself :)