14 ms·

Inferno: A small operating system for building crossplatform distributed systems

93 points by hemloc_io 5y ago

api 5y ago
> Inferno applications are written in Limbo®, a modern, safe, modular, concurrent programming language with C-like syntax. It is more powerful than C but considerably easier to understand and debug than C++ or Java. It is easy to express the concurrency in the physical world directly in Limbo's syntax. Any Inferno application will run identically on all Inferno platforms. I was amazed by what a great idea this is until I got here. You have to use a special snowflake programming language. This is the same thing that turns me off from Google's Flutter. You have to use Dart, a language not used anywhere else. It's not that these languages are bad. They may be fine, even great. It's the cognitive load of learning yet another language. For it to make sense this language would have to be quite a bit more productive or otherwise better than Go, Rust, C++, JS/TS, Python, Java, etc. Otherwise just let people use languages they know. It's not that hard. We now have WASM which can be targeted by all of those either directly or indirectly.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  The Limbo language predated Go by over a decade, and is, in fact, a predecessor of Go. I think its creation and use in this system makes more sense in the context of 1995 when it was initially created.
  - salmo 5y ago
    Yeah, they both share Rob Pike and the Bell Labs heritage. Weird side note: Renee French did both the Plan 9 and Go mascot designs as well. https://go.dev/blog/gopher https://go.dev/blog/gopher And to the further above, there are other languages and compilers supported on Plan 9/Inferno. Like Go.
    - bear8642 5y ago
      Well she is married to Rob Pike…
      - kencausey 5y ago
        And Penn Jillette knew both of them and introduced them to each other. Source: Penn's radio show where Rob and Renee were each guests at different times.
    - kragen 5y ago
      Golang and Limbo share a lot more than that!
      - MikeTheGreat 5y ago
        I don't suppose there's a web page / article / etc that spells some of this out, is there? When I try searching for "golang" and "limbo X" (where X = history, or comparison, or..., or...) it looks like the popularity of golang swamps any pages that might compare Go and Limbo.
        akshayshah 5y ago
        https://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/ https://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/ https://spf13.com/presentation/on-the-shoulders-of-giants/ https://spf13.com/presentation/on-the-shoulders-of-giants/ https://seh.dev/go-legacy/ https://seh.dev/go-legacy/
        MikeTheGreat 5y ago
        Thanks!
- imachine1980_ 5y ago
  Limbo is from 95 java is from 96 js from 98, go and rust from 20xx something, and dart is made from the ground up to be compile to multiple plataforms, I wish they make kotling in the same way to be onest but I can't say is dumb flutter apps are fast in comparison to react native becouse they don't need a virtual Dom in the process
  - hestefisk 5y ago
    Java first release was in 1995…
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- akkartik 5y ago
  I built a computer with its own languages, and I consider it to be _less_ cognitive load when everything is in 1/2/3 languages. I don't have to worry that the next program I want to read the sources will require "Go, Rust, C++, JS/TS, Python, Java, etc." There are other metrics to consider besides your notions of cognitive load and productivity. Inferno predates most of the languages on your list. My computer (https://github.com/akkartik/mu https://github.com/akkartik/mu) uses custom languages because I was able to design them to minimize total LoC, and to ensure the dependency graph has no cycles (unlike all of the conventional software stack, at least until https://www.gnu.org/software/mes https://www.gnu.org/software/mes connects up all the dots).
- ModernMech 5y ago
  > For it to make sense this language would have to be quite a bit more productive or otherwise better than Go, Rust, C++, JS/TS, Python, Java, etc. Concurrent programming languages are quite a bit more expressive and therefore productive for distributed systems than the languages you listed. Go, Rust, C++ JS, Python, Java etc. are all imperative languages with sequential semantics. Writing concurrent programs in these languages is much harder than using a specialized language. There's a reason Erlang and BEAM is preferred by many to write distributed systems as opposed to C++. Languages designed with asynchronous, distributed, parallel semantics from the ground up allow a higher degree of expressivity when it comes to distributed systems. Obviously you can write anything you want in imperative languages, but the semantics really work against you to the point where concurrent programming is generally considered "hard" by users of these languages. It really don't have to be that hard, or at least not any harder than sequential programming. I would say if you only know the languages listed, then learning a concurrent languages would expand your mind rather than burden it.
- FpUser 5y ago
  If language is half decent I personally do not feel any cognitive load of learning and using it (excluding brainfuck like things of course). I do not change language for the heck of it because I am a vendor / custom product developer and need to see financial reasons first, yet it happens often enough
- 7373737373 5y ago
  > Portable programs: Inferno programs are written in the type-safe language Limbo and compiled to Dis bytecode, which can be run without modifications on all Inferno platforms. The point is that this and similar operating systems have sufficiently different (and better) security models that extend to the virtual machine level, which makes creating a new languages that are compatible with them necessary. Other languages could be (re)written to compile to the bytecode, or at least live in emulated environments within the safe zones. Our current operating systems, virtual machines and languages are laughably insecure, whereas these advanced systems can give the programmer and user more control over and guarantees about the behavior of these systems. If we keep using the current models, we'll have to keep using and building domain specific languages, container protocols, browser sandboxes, mini-vm's, all kinds of incompatible and stacked interfaces, whereas well designed systems recursively nest sandboxes gracefully. Resource (e.g. cpu time, memory space) and access security have been utterly neglected in currently popular languages, which will haunt us again and again until we finally learn better. Newer systems like WebAssembly are starting to begin to consider at least the latter, where a program can be isolated in a sandbox with a well defined and airtight interface. https://medium.com/agoric/pola-would-have-prevented-the-event-stream-incident-45653ecbda99 https://medium.com/agoric/pola-would-have-prevented-the-even... https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41 https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect
throw0101a 5y ago
Inferno is the 'successor' to / a descendant of Plan 9: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)
- kragen 5y ago
  And the predecessor of Golang.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    That would be Limbo, and the language is called Go.
    - kragen 5y ago
      Yup. I don't know if you've noticed, I try to be careful to include enough context in my comments to disambiguate multiple candidate meanings, and "Go" is not specific enough.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Go is more than specific enough, unless you go writing the name in lowercase.
        kragen 5y ago
        Take it up with the people who named the golang-nuts and golang-dev mailing lists, then.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        That is not the name of the programming language. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language) I don't see people saying Dlang, Clang, Javalang, C++Lang, Rustlang, Swiftlang,....
foobarian 5y ago
What a blast from the past. I was at Murray Hill around that time and remember the "Inferno" posters everywhere. It seemed like a legit project with some real corporate backing. From what I understood it was hoped to be used as a router OS in the core routers they were developing there.
butterisgood 5y ago
Here it is running on a Nintendo DS https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/File:Infernods2.png https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/File:Infernods2.png
encryptluks2 5y ago
> By using one standard protocol for all network communication, security can be focused on one point and provided at a system level. Inferno offers full support for authenticated, encrypted connections using a certificate based user identification scheme and variety of algorithms including: > IDEA, 56 bit DES, 40, 128 and 256 bit RC4 encryption algorithms MD4, MD5 and SHA secure hash algorithms Seems ambitious but quite antiquated already. The site reminds me of TempleOS for some reason.
- kragen 5y ago
  It seems antiquated because it was released in 01996 and hasn't been updated much in 20 years.
  - seabrookmx 5y ago
    I've never seen years in octal before :)
    - willcipriano 5y ago
      If you want to be extra obnoxious you can do something like: 820458671
      - encryptluks2 5y ago
        Nothing more fun than converting epoch times.
    - kragen 5y ago
      Heh, you must think Inferno is pretty old!
      - rurban 5y ago
        it is. it was the better java those times, but didn't have such a big backing as from Sun.
keithnz 5y ago
I think it is worth noting this is more "historical" and seems a somewhat dead project now, quite a few of the links are dead, download page last updated 2015, the repo hasn't really had an significant commits for over a year.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  "Host Operating Systems: Windows NT/2000/XP, Irix" ... "As a demonstration, Inferno also ran as a plug-in under Internet Explorer version 4." I would be more interested in the back-story behind this. Why did the creators of Unix think this would be a good way to take on the Java juggernaut? They had a language, Limbo, a lot like Go with a bytecode interpreter a lot like JVM. What was it for?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - mburee 5y ago
    I guess it was just a competitor? One time they even had a crosscompiler to run Limbo on the JVM
- alatkins 5y ago
  Does anyone know of any similar active projects?
marttt 5y ago
Two great blogs about actually using and improving Inferno (the relevant posts are 5-10 years old, though): Inferno programmer's notebook by Caerwyn Jones: lots of experiments with detailed descriptions and code. The entire blog is really thoughtful actually: https://web.archive.org/web/20200519122543/http://ipn.caerwyn.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200519122543/http://ipn.caerwy... The author also provided Acme-SAC, stripping Inferno to a barebones VM that only runs the Acme editor and the shell: https://github.com/caerwynj/acme-sac https://github.com/caerwynj/acme-sac The other blog is Pete Elmore's Debu.gs. Using Inferno for real work, etc. A really well written blog, too: http://debu.gs/tags/inferno http://debu.gs/tags/inferno Also worth noting are mjl's repos, he wrote a lot of code to improve Inferno for real-life usage. Possibly all of them are linked in this extensive list: https://github.com/henesy/awesome-inferno https://github.com/henesy/awesome-inferno I personally really liked Inferno's shell.
- hemloc_io 5y ago
  My professor, Brian L. Stuart, was Inferno enthusiast and wrote a great small book on how it all works (We used it for class.) if you've read all of these his book might be interesting. https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Operating-Systems-Applications-Advanced/dp/1418837695 https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Operating-Systems-Applicat... (It's also pretty easily available online if you cannot afford or find the hard copy.)
pjmlp 5y ago
This is the project that people actually should wonder about instead of always stopping in Plan 9, a middle stop.
pjmlp 5y ago
Also worth a read regarding Inferno's influences, "Oberon, Plan 9 and Inferno" https://blog.tsr-podcast.com/index.php/2021/05/13/episode-76-oberon-plan-9-inferno/ https://blog.tsr-podcast.com/index.php/2021/05/13/episode-76...
luismedel 5y ago
One of my wild ideas was to use my own port of the Dis virtual machine to program cross-platform games using Limbo, which I find very pleasant lang to use, honestly, and a custom graphics library. Sadly, life happens and I'm still in the process of giving form to my idea with my half-baked emulator[0] :-) [0] https://github.com/luismedel/sixthcircle https://github.com/luismedel/sixthcircle

93 points by hemloc_io 5y ago

api 5y ago

> Inferno applications are written in Limbo®, a modern, safe, modular, concurrent programming language with C-like syntax. It is more powerful than C but considerably easier to understand and debug than C++ or Java. It is easy to express the concurrency in the physical world directly in Limbo's syntax. Any Inferno application will run identically on all Inferno platforms. I was amazed by what a great idea this is until I got here. You have to use a special snowflake programming language. This is the same thing that turns me off from Google's Flutter. You have to use Dart, a language not used anywhere else. It's not that these languages are bad. They may be fine, even great. It's the cognitive load of learning yet another language. For it to make sense this language would have to be quite a bit more productive or otherwise better than Go, Rust, C++, JS/TS, Python, Java, etc. Otherwise just let people use languages they know. It's not that hard. We now have WASM which can be targeted by all of those either directly or indirectly.

Jtsummers 5y ago
The Limbo language predated Go by over a decade, and is, in fact, a predecessor of Go. I think its creation and use in this system makes more sense in the context of 1995 when it was initially created.
- salmo 5y ago
  Yeah, they both share Rob Pike and the Bell Labs heritage. Weird side note: Renee French did both the Plan 9 and Go mascot designs as well. https://go.dev/blog/gopher https://go.dev/blog/gopher And to the further above, there are other languages and compilers supported on Plan 9/Inferno. Like Go.
  - bear8642 5y ago
    Well she is married to Rob Pike…
    - kencausey 5y ago
      And Penn Jillette knew both of them and introduced them to each other. Source: Penn's radio show where Rob and Renee were each guests at different times.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Golang and Limbo share a lot more than that!
    - MikeTheGreat 5y ago
      I don't suppose there's a web page / article / etc that spells some of this out, is there? When I try searching for "golang" and "limbo X" (where X = history, or comparison, or..., or...) it looks like the popularity of golang swamps any pages that might compare Go and Limbo.
      - akshayshah 5y ago
        https://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/ https://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/ https://spf13.com/presentation/on-the-shoulders-of-giants/ https://spf13.com/presentation/on-the-shoulders-of-giants/ https://seh.dev/go-legacy/ https://seh.dev/go-legacy/
        MikeTheGreat 5y ago
        Thanks!
imachine1980_ 5y ago
Limbo is from 95 java is from 96 js from 98, go and rust from 20xx something, and dart is made from the ground up to be compile to multiple plataforms, I wish they make kotling in the same way to be onest but I can't say is dumb flutter apps are fast in comparison to react native becouse they don't need a virtual Dom in the process
- hestefisk 5y ago
  Java first release was in 1995…
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
akkartik 5y ago
I built a computer with its own languages, and I consider it to be _less_ cognitive load when everything is in 1/2/3 languages. I don't have to worry that the next program I want to read the sources will require "Go, Rust, C++, JS/TS, Python, Java, etc." There are other metrics to consider besides your notions of cognitive load and productivity. Inferno predates most of the languages on your list. My computer (https://github.com/akkartik/mu https://github.com/akkartik/mu) uses custom languages because I was able to design them to minimize total LoC, and to ensure the dependency graph has no cycles (unlike all of the conventional software stack, at least until https://www.gnu.org/software/mes https://www.gnu.org/software/mes connects up all the dots).
ModernMech 5y ago
> For it to make sense this language would have to be quite a bit more productive or otherwise better than Go, Rust, C++, JS/TS, Python, Java, etc. Concurrent programming languages are quite a bit more expressive and therefore productive for distributed systems than the languages you listed. Go, Rust, C++ JS, Python, Java etc. are all imperative languages with sequential semantics. Writing concurrent programs in these languages is much harder than using a specialized language. There's a reason Erlang and BEAM is preferred by many to write distributed systems as opposed to C++. Languages designed with asynchronous, distributed, parallel semantics from the ground up allow a higher degree of expressivity when it comes to distributed systems. Obviously you can write anything you want in imperative languages, but the semantics really work against you to the point where concurrent programming is generally considered "hard" by users of these languages. It really don't have to be that hard, or at least not any harder than sequential programming. I would say if you only know the languages listed, then learning a concurrent languages would expand your mind rather than burden it.
FpUser 5y ago
If language is half decent I personally do not feel any cognitive load of learning and using it (excluding brainfuck like things of course). I do not change language for the heck of it because I am a vendor / custom product developer and need to see financial reasons first, yet it happens often enough
7373737373 5y ago
> Portable programs: Inferno programs are written in the type-safe language Limbo and compiled to Dis bytecode, which can be run without modifications on all Inferno platforms. The point is that this and similar operating systems have sufficiently different (and better) security models that extend to the virtual machine level, which makes creating a new languages that are compatible with them necessary. Other languages could be (re)written to compile to the bytecode, or at least live in emulated environments within the safe zones. Our current operating systems, virtual machines and languages are laughably insecure, whereas these advanced systems can give the programmer and user more control over and guarantees about the behavior of these systems. If we keep using the current models, we'll have to keep using and building domain specific languages, container protocols, browser sandboxes, mini-vm's, all kinds of incompatible and stacked interfaces, whereas well designed systems recursively nest sandboxes gracefully. Resource (e.g. cpu time, memory space) and access security have been utterly neglected in currently popular languages, which will haunt us again and again until we finally learn better. Newer systems like WebAssembly are starting to begin to consider at least the latter, where a program can be isolated in a sandbox with a well defined and airtight interface. https://medium.com/agoric/pola-would-have-prevented-the-event-stream-incident-45653ecbda99 https://medium.com/agoric/pola-would-have-prevented-the-even... https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41 https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect

throw0101a 5y ago

Inferno is the 'successor' to / a descendant of Plan 9: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)

kragen 5y ago
And the predecessor of Golang.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pjmlp 5y ago
  That would be Limbo, and the language is called Go.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Yup. I don't know if you've noticed, I try to be careful to include enough context in my comments to disambiguate multiple candidate meanings, and "Go" is not specific enough.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Go is more than specific enough, unless you go writing the name in lowercase.
      - kragen 5y ago
        Take it up with the people who named the golang-nuts and golang-dev mailing lists, then.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        That is not the name of the programming language. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language) I don't see people saying Dlang, Clang, Javalang, C++Lang, Rustlang, Swiftlang,....

foobarian 5y ago

What a blast from the past. I was at Murray Hill around that time and remember the "Inferno" posters everywhere. It seemed like a legit project with some real corporate backing. From what I understood it was hoped to be used as a router OS in the core routers they were developing there.

butterisgood 5y ago

Here it is running on a Nintendo DS https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/File:Infernods2.png https://www.gamebrew.org/wiki/File:Infernods2.png

encryptluks2 5y ago

> By using one standard protocol for all network communication, security can be focused on one point and provided at a system level. Inferno offers full support for authenticated, encrypted connections using a certificate based user identification scheme and variety of algorithms including: > IDEA, 56 bit DES, 40, 128 and 256 bit RC4 encryption algorithms MD4, MD5 and SHA secure hash algorithms Seems ambitious but quite antiquated already. The site reminds me of TempleOS for some reason.

kragen 5y ago
It seems antiquated because it was released in 01996 and hasn't been updated much in 20 years.
- seabrookmx 5y ago
  I've never seen years in octal before :)
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    If you want to be extra obnoxious you can do something like: 820458671
    - encryptluks2 5y ago
      Nothing more fun than converting epoch times.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Heh, you must think Inferno is pretty old!
    - rurban 5y ago
      it is. it was the better java those times, but didn't have such a big backing as from Sun.

keithnz 5y ago

I think it is worth noting this is more "historical" and seems a somewhat dead project now, quite a few of the links are dead, download page last updated 2015, the repo hasn't really had an significant commits for over a year.

ncmncm 5y ago
"Host Operating Systems: Windows NT/2000/XP, Irix" ... "As a demonstration, Inferno also ran as a plug-in under Internet Explorer version 4." I would be more interested in the back-story behind this. Why did the creators of Unix think this would be a good way to take on the Java juggernaut? They had a language, Limbo, a lot like Go with a bytecode interpreter a lot like JVM. What was it for?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mburee 5y ago
  I guess it was just a competitor? One time they even had a crosscompiler to run Limbo on the JVM
alatkins 5y ago
Does anyone know of any similar active projects?

marttt 5y ago

Two great blogs about actually using and improving Inferno (the relevant posts are 5-10 years old, though): Inferno programmer's notebook by Caerwyn Jones: lots of experiments with detailed descriptions and code. The entire blog is really thoughtful actually: https://web.archive.org/web/20200519122543/http://ipn.caerwyn.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200519122543/http://ipn.caerwy... The author also provided Acme-SAC, stripping Inferno to a barebones VM that only runs the Acme editor and the shell: https://github.com/caerwynj/acme-sac https://github.com/caerwynj/acme-sac The other blog is Pete Elmore's Debu.gs. Using Inferno for real work, etc. A really well written blog, too: http://debu.gs/tags/inferno http://debu.gs/tags/inferno Also worth noting are mjl's repos, he wrote a lot of code to improve Inferno for real-life usage. Possibly all of them are linked in this extensive list: https://github.com/henesy/awesome-inferno https://github.com/henesy/awesome-inferno I personally really liked Inferno's shell.

hemloc_io 5y ago
My professor, Brian L. Stuart, was Inferno enthusiast and wrote a great small book on how it all works (We used it for class.) if you've read all of these his book might be interesting. https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Operating-Systems-Applications-Advanced/dp/1418837695 https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Operating-Systems-Applicat... (It's also pretty easily available online if you cannot afford or find the hard copy.)

pjmlp 5y ago

This is the project that people actually should wonder about instead of always stopping in Plan 9, a middle stop.

pjmlp 5y ago

Also worth a read regarding Inferno's influences, "Oberon, Plan 9 and Inferno" https://blog.tsr-podcast.com/index.php/2021/05/13/episode-76-oberon-plan-9-inferno/ https://blog.tsr-podcast.com/index.php/2021/05/13/episode-76...

luismedel 5y ago

One of my wild ideas was to use my own port of the Dis virtual machine to program cross-platform games using Limbo, which I find very pleasant lang to use, honestly, and a custom graphics library. Sadly, life happens and I'm still in the process of giving form to my idea with my half-baked emulator[0] :-) [0] https://github.com/luismedel/sixthcircle https://github.com/luismedel/sixthcircle