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Plan9 was already largely rewritten in a precursor to Go called Limbo. It's garbage collected and runs on a virtual machine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infern

• 4ad 12y ago
  Plan 9 and Inferno are very related, but I wouldn't say Inferno is "Plan 9 rewritten in Limbo", nor is Limbo equivalent enough to Go for the comparison to make sense. First, the Inferno kernel is written in C, not Limbo, and is somewhat similar to the Plan 9 kernel to the point that is moderately feasible to port drivers from Plan 9 to Inferno. Second, you could say acme was rewritten from alef (not C) to Limbo, and maybe you can say cat, tail, mk and yacc were "rewritten in Limbo", but soon after the list ends. Most utilities are genuinely new utilities that make use of the different abstractions provided by the operating system. Of course there are lots of high-level similarities, but they are quite different programs. This brings me to my next point, the abstractions provided by Plan 9 and Inferno are very different. Different enough that a new set of tools makes sense. For comparison, rewriting C code to Go uses the same underlying abstractions, so it doesn't make as much sense. Another point I want to make is that compiled Limbo programs are extremely small, and Limbo is dynamically loaded, unlike Go. Yet another point is that Limbo programs use reference counting plus a real-time garbage collector for cycles, which is made easier by Limbo and Inferno constraints. Go uses neither and the language is different enough to prevent a real time garbage collector.