Inferno was Lucents answer to Sun's Java and was intended as a commercial product. They stopped all Plan 9 development for a year to work on it. The big difference and attraction to me are the pure VM user space and the dual build path where you can build it for bare metal or hosted on a number of operating systems (Plan 9, Windows, BSD, Unix, Linux, web browser, etc.) That way you can run Inferno applications just about anywhere (even microcontrollers). The Limbo language is part of Go's lineage as well: https://seh.dev/go-legacy/