Inferno: A small operating system for building crossplatform distributed systems

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • mu

    Soul of a tiny new machine. More thorough tests → More comprehensible and rewrite-friendly software → More resilient society. (by akkartik)

  • 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) 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 connects up all the dots).

  • acme-sac

    ACME SAC (Stand Alone Complex) - The ACME editor for Windows/Mac/Linux

  • 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.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

    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

    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:

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  • awesome-inferno

    A curated list of awesome Inferno documents, libraries, and software

  • sixthcircle

    A partial, yet functional, implementation of the Inferno Dis virtual machine in C#

  • 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

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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