Inferno is kind of like Plan 9 running on a VM, with its own peculiarites like a really nice shell language. Having a VM, versus integrating with the host os li

Inferno is kind of like Plan 9 running on a VM, with its own peculiarites like a really nice shell language. Having a VM, versus integrating with the host os like plan9port or cygwin, lets you use new features of the os like directory binding and the /env directory of shell variables. There's an os command to run programs on the underlying host, be it windows, windows with cygwin, or linux.