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Thank you for your response, but I'm thinking perhaps I didn't explain the reason why I was asking. I understand that Inferno has a different design based on a

Thank you for your response, but I'm thinking perhaps I didn't explain the reason why I was asking. I understand that Inferno has a different design based on a VM, what I'm trying to ascertain is... why is it better than what came before? The design decisions were more than likely based on a desire to improve on what came before, my questions are about what the designers seeked to improve. In other words, rather than knowing it's a different design, I'd like to know why it's a better design (or to be more fair, what are its strengths and weaknesses)?

qubex 9y ago
Plan9 (and Inferno, the virtualised descendent thereof) embody a single, unifying abstraction: that everything is a file. This often stated in Unix but (beyond the /dev and on Linux /proc & /sys filesystems) there’s lots of things that aren’t files (the framebuffer, network sockets...). In Plan9 and Inferno if you want to do something to anything all you need to do is know fopen & company.