Limbo

Limbo is a programming language for writing distributed systems and is the language used to write applications for the Inferno operating system. It was designed at Bell Labs by Sean Dorward, Phil Winterbottom, and Rob Pike. The Limbo compiler generates architecture-independent object code which is then interpreted by the Dis virtual machine or compiled just before runtime to improve performance. Therefore all Limbo applications are completely portable across all Inferno platforms. Limbo's approach to concurrency was inspired by Hoare's communicating sequential processes (CSP), as implemented and amended in Pike's earlier Newsqueak language and Winterbottom's Alef. Language features Limbo supports the following features: modular programming concurrent programming strong type checking at compile and run-time interprocess communication over typed channels automatic garbage collection simple abstract data types