"This article says that the shell uses lists rather than strings for some things. Great, does that mean this shell deals with spaces and newlines in filenames better than bash?"
all inferno modules are written in limbo, which has a safe memory model, so modules can't access data they're not given.
check out some of the inferno papers, and the limbo language in particular, which is an elegant predecessor of Go, including some things that Go still does not have - the dynamic module loading being the most marked example, and the main reason i haven't yet ported the inferno shell to Go.
it's less of a problem for gofix because Go's static typing means it's easy to be much more precise about which methods and functions are actually being used.
absolutely. that was rc's main innovation IMO.