Inferno® is a compact operating system designed for building distributed and networked systems on a wide variety of devices and platforms. With many advanced and unique features, Inferno puts an unrivalled set of tools into your hands. You can fetch it now as Free Software, on similar terms to Linux or xBSD.

Host Operating Systems Windows NT/2000/XP Irix Linux MacOS X FreeBSD Solaris Plan 9

Supported Architectures ARM (ARM32, Thumb) Intel x86 (386 & higher) PowerPC SPARC

Portable Applications
Inferno applications are written in Limbo®, a modern, safe, modular, concurrent programming language with C-like syntax. It is more powerful than C but considerably easier to understand and debug than C++ or Java. It is easy to express the concurrency in the physical world directly in Limbo's syntax. Any Inferno application will run identically on all Inferno platforms.

Portable Code
Limbo code is compiled into architecture independent code for the Dis® Virtual Machine, with a compact representation. Dis can be interpreted directly (saving space), or compiled on the fly for a given target processor (saving time). The choice can be made at run-time, per module. The Dis architecture was carefully designed to make on-the-fly code generation straightforward. Its instructions are easy to implement.

Transparent Resources
Inferno offers complete transparency of resources and data using a simple but powerful 'namespace' system. By representing resources as files and having one standard communication protocol — 9P (Styx®) — resources such as data stores, services and external devices can easily be shared between Inferno systems. A resource interface may be imported to the local system and used by the applications without them knowing, or needing to know, whether it is local or remote.

Security
High level security is an important part of the Inferno system. By using one standard protocol for all network communication, security can be focused on one point and provided at a system level. Inferno offers full support for authenticated, encrypted connections using a certificate based user identification scheme and variety of algorithms including:

• IDEA, 56 bit DES, 40, 128 and 256 bit RC4 encryption algorithms
• MD4, MD5 and SHA secure hash algorithms

A Complete Solution
Inferno is not only an operating system, it is also a complete development environment, providing all the tools necessary for creating, testing and debugging the applications that run within it.

• Acme IDE: includes editor, shell, advanced pattern matching tools & more
• Fast Compiler: with full syntax and compile time type checking
• Graphical Debugger: with full stack trace for currently executing threads
• Powerful Shell: with sophisticated scripting capabilities
• UNIX like commands: including bind, grep, gzip, mount, ps, tar, yacc...