Do they plan for it to be self-hosting? It would look weird to have such a small system being absolutely dwarfed by the size of its compiler. It would also look weird to have such a lightweight system with a compiler than can't fit in a 32-bit address space.
Something feels off here.
Elegant
I love to see people continuing the development of stuff derived from or inspired by Plan 9.
For context: R9 is the successor project to Harvey OS.
Harvey was basically "Plan 9 but compiled with GCC instead of Plan 9 C."
https://harvey-os.org/
I am not sure Rust is the right choice here, though.
Rust is still quite immature, the GCC Rust especially so. LLVM is very big and very complicated.
Plan 9’s C is a smaller, simpler, faster C than C. This seems to be going the other way.
Taking Inferno – broadly, Plan 9 version 2 – and porting the Golang compiler to Dis, and then starting to transfer Go stuff into Inferno would seem more like “keeping it in the family.”
Better still, adding more language support that targets Dis, like say D, or Rust, or Ada, or any of the umpteen C wannabes from Crystal to D to Hare to Nim, that would be really interesting…