On Thu, 4/28/16, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: Actually, it's best not to think of Inferno as a successor to Plan 9, but as an offshoot. The real story has more to do with Lucent internal dynamics than to do with attempting to develop a better research platform. Plan 9 has always been a good platform for research, and the fact that it's the most pleasant development environment I've ever used is a nice plus. However, Inferno was created to be a platform for products. The Inferno kernel was basically forked from the 2nd Edition Plan9 kernel, and naturally there are some places that differ from the current 4th Edition Plan 9 kernel. However, a number of the differences have been resolved over the years, and the same guy does most of the maintenance of the compiler suite that's used for native Inferno builds and for Plan 9. Although you usually can't just drop driver code from one kernel into the other, the differences are not so great as to make the port difficult. So both still exist and both still get some development as people who care decide to make changes, but they've never really been in a position to merge. And BTW, if you like the objectives of the Limbo language in Inferno, you'll find a lot of the ideas and lessons learned from it in Go. After all, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson were two of the main people behind Go and, of course, they had been at the labs, primarily working on Plan 9, before moving to Google. BLS