The notion you talk of with your integer exchange is called "channels" which are typed pipes. see http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/thread http://plan

The notion you talk of with your integer exchange is called "channels" which are typed pipes. see http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/thread http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/thread for the C library On Inferno the Limbo language has channels as a type with their own operators Send an integer down chan <- = 5; and read it out i = <- chan I don't understand what you mean by "get into as easily". The distribution CD is also a Live CD so you can boot right into it. The kernel code can be understood by one person. There are commentaries such as http://lsub.org/who/nemo/papers.html http://lsub.org/who/nemo/papers.html It runs in qemu, vmware player, Xen, Lguest We are thinking of doing a qemu image release but not worked out an auto installation system quite yet (the distribution cd is rebuilt every night with the new commits). We have irc://irc.freenode.org/#plan9 for unofficial chat (though with the usual caveats) And a mailing list where you might get your question answered by Rob Pike, Dennis Ritchie, Russ Cox or one of the many knowledgable people involved in or using the project (plan9 runs on IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer for instance and is used at LANL, Sandanista, NASA JPL, MIT). There's also Russ' usermode projects : 9vx - http://swtch.com/9vx/ http://swtch.com/9vx/ a plan9 that runs in the vx32 x86 sandboxing environment and plan9port - http://swtch.com/plan9port/ http://swtch.com/plan9port/ - which is the plan9 user tools ported to Lunix I'd say that was a quite comprehensive set of "get into" tools :>