I think 9vx is now the equivalent of software tools from the old days. It's fast. But the big beauty of it for me is that in vx32/src/9vx/a is pretty much a plan 9 kernel in plan 9 C vernacular. I just spent an easy short time prototyping some new stuff that I can now drop into a real plan 9 kernel for Blue Gene, no changes needed. The edit/build/test boot cycle is measured in seconds. The fact that we have a friendly path via codereview(1) and bitbucket is the icing on the cake.
I know some folks who are using 9vx to get the hang of plan 9. Their 9vx window is always up. It's a great way to ease into the system. So we have some nice paths. For many unix-like systems, we have plan9ports. For more of the "real deal", we have 9vx -- and you can proto some of your kernel code in that environment. And we've got some very nice ARM platforms coming along, such as the beagleboard, which are good enough to be a desktop. USB is in, bluetooth is coming ... things are looking good! ron
