Inferno is an operating system for creating and supporting distributed services. The name of the operating system and of its associated programs, as well as of the company Vita Nuova that produced it, were inspired by the literary heritage of Dante Alighieri, particularly the Divine Comedy.

Inferno runs either in hosted mode under several different operating systems or natively on a range of hardware architectures. In each configuration the operating system presents the same standard interfaces to its applications. A communications protocol called Styx is applied uniformly to access both local and remote resources. As of the fourth edition of Inferno, Styx is identical to Plan 9's newer version of its hallmark 9P protocol, 9P2000.

Applications are written in the type-safe Limbo programming language, whose binary representation is identical over all platforms, and is executed using Just-in-time compilation techniques in a virtual machine.

Inferno can also be hosted by a plug-in to Internet Explorer.

In 2003 a preview of Inferno 4th edition was released by Vita Nuova under an open source license similar to the GPL; the C compilers and other tools have been released under a BSD-like license.

External links

• Inferno Fourth Edition Download, including source code
• http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/index.html
• http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/pidoc/index.html