Inferno is the 'successor' to / a descendant of Plan 9:<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs</a><p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)</a>
I think it is worth noting this is more "historical" and seems a somewhat dead project now, quite a few of the links are dead, download page last updated 2015, the repo hasn't really had an significant commits for over a year.
Two great blogs about actually using and improving Inferno (the relevant posts are 5-10 years old, though):<p>Inferno programmer's notebook by Caerwyn Jones: lots of experiments with detailed descriptions and code. The entire blog is really thoughtful actually: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200519122543/http://ipn.caerwyn.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20200519122543/http://ipn.caerwy...</a><p>The author also provided Acme-SAC, stripping Inferno to a barebones VM that only runs the Acme editor and the shell: <a href="https://github.com/caerwynj/acme-sac" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/caerwynj/acme-sac</a><p>The other blog is Pete Elmore's Debu.gs. Using Inferno for real work, etc. A really well written blog, too: <a href="http://debu.gs/tags/inferno" rel="nofollow">http://debu.gs/tags/inferno</a><p>Also worth noting are mjl's repos, he wrote a lot of code to improve Inferno for real-life usage. Possibly all of them are linked in this extensive list:
<a href="https://github.com/henesy/awesome-inferno" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/henesy/awesome-inferno</a><p>I personally really liked Inferno's shell.
Also worth a read regarding Inferno's influences,<p>"Oberon, Plan 9 and Inferno"<p><a href="https://blog.tsr-podcast.com/index.php/2021/05/13/episode-76-oberon-plan-9-inferno/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.tsr-podcast.com/index.php/2021/05/13/episode-76...</a>
Here it is running on a Nintendo DS <a href="https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/File:Infernods2.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/File:Infernods2.png</a>
What a blast from the past. I was at Murray Hill around that time and remember the "Inferno" posters everywhere. It seemed like a legit project with some real corporate backing. From what I understood it was hoped to be used as a router OS in the core routers they were developing there.
One of my wild ideas was to use my own port of the Dis virtual machine to program cross-platform games using Limbo, which I find very pleasant lang to use, honestly, and a custom graphics library.<p>Sadly, life happens and I'm still in the process of giving form to my idea with my half-baked emulator[0] :-)<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/luismedel/sixthcircle" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/luismedel/sixthcircle</a>
> By using one standard protocol for all network communication, security can be focused on one point and provided at a system level. Inferno offers full support for authenticated, encrypted connections using a certificate based user identification scheme and variety of algorithms including:<p>> IDEA, 56 bit DES, 40, 128 and 256 bit RC4 encryption algorithms
MD4, MD5 and SHA secure hash algorithms<p>Seems ambitious but quite antiquated already. The site reminds me of TempleOS for some reason.
> Inferno applications are written in Limbo®, a modern, safe, modular, concurrent programming language with C-like syntax. It is more powerful than C but considerably easier to understand and debug than C++ or Java. It is easy to express the concurrency in the physical world directly in Limbo's syntax. Any Inferno application will run identically on all Inferno platforms.<p>I was amazed by what a great idea this is until I got here. You have to use a special snowflake programming language.<p>This is the same thing that turns me off from Google's Flutter. You have to use Dart, a language not used anywhere else.<p>It's not that these languages are bad. They may be fine, even great. It's the cognitive load of learning <i>yet another language</i>. For it to make sense this language would have to be quite a bit more productive or otherwise better than Go, Rust, C++, JS/TS, Python, Java, etc. Otherwise just let people use languages they know. It's not that hard. We now have WASM which can be targeted by all of those either directly or indirectly.