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Comment by tiu | Hacker News Reader

Why Plan 9 seems to be 'much' more popular/discussed and not Inferno?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)

> Applications are written in the Limbo programming language, which provides static typing, garbage collection, and built-in concurrency features. Limbo code is compiled into architecture-independent bytecode executed by the Dis virtual machine. The Dis VM can interpret the bytecode or compile it just-in-time into native instructions, allowing applications to run consistently across different platforms.

Can you port existing software to it, or do you have to rewrite everything in Limbo? Because if you do, that right there almost completely kills it IMO.

You could port as much as what was already on Plan 9, so same restrictions apply as UNIX to Plan 9.

The C compiler is there, the same way as in Plan 9, Inferno is the evolution of Plan 9, in one way it was Bell Labs response to Java, in other way it was another take to what went wrong in Plan 9 like the failure to design Alef to be usable.

Naturally Limbo was prefered as the main userspace language, from safety and usability point of view.

Ah, okay, I thought limbo was the only userspace language, which would massively hinder adoption. If that's not the case then I know of no particular technical reason inferno wouldn't be a good option. I do wonder if other people had the same misunderstanding as I did.

Here is one of the places where you can see the reference to C compiler being available.

https://inferno-os.org/solutions/embedded

As someone who tried to use both, there is little you can do with it in practice when compared to Plan9. There was a _great_ baremetal port of Inferno to the Raspberry Pi, but there aren't any modern versions for other SBCs.

Yes, it is a tragedy that so many leave the UNIX evolution[0] train at the middle station, instead of the end.

[0] - as per what its creators worked on following it

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