| HN Mirror

I'll also anticipate the questions :

Inferno is an operating system built using similar principles to Plan 9. Everything is a file and 9p is the glue (called Styx in Inferno). However the core of the system is the Emu virtual machine. The system and drivers are written in C but the userland programs are written in Limbo and executed in the VM which can JIT compile it if necessary. It runs on multiple architectures X86, ARM, PowerPC and Sparc.

Another great feature is that the whole shebang can run as a user application in Windows / Linux / OSX / BSD / Plan9 / Solaris and even as an ActiveX control in Internet Explorer!

There is a program wm/wm which presents a draw device with the same protocol as Plan9 which takes a headache out of porting familiar Plan9 programs like Acme. This has also enabled a spin-off Acme-SAC (Stand Alone Client) which is basically Acme for $OS - http://www.caerwyn.com/acme/

Limbo is a statically typed, garbage collected language with built in primitives for CSP style coding ( http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/ )

    hear(c : chan of string; ip : string)
    {
        result : string;
        # code here for opening and listening
        c <-= result;
    }

    c := array[4] of chan of string;
    spawn(hear, c[0], "123.123.123.10");
    spawn(hear, c[1], "123.123.123.11");
    spawn(hear, c[2], "123.123.123.12");
    spawn(hear, c[3], "123.123.123.13");

    (i, s) := <-c;
    sys->print("%s came from %d\n", i, j);