Limbo (programming language)

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**Limbo** <tr><th>Paradigm:</th><td>Concurrent</td></tr><tr><th>Appeared in:</th><td>1995</td></tr><tr><th>Designed by:</th><td>Dennis Ritchie, Sean Dorward, Phil Winterbottom, and Rob Pike</td></tr><tr><th>Developer:</th><td>Bell Labs/Vita Nuova</td></tr><tr><th>Typing discipline:</th><td>Strong</td></tr><tr><th>Major implementations:</th><td>Dis</td></tr><tr><th>Influenced by:</th><td>C, CSP, Alef</td></tr><tr><th>Influenced:</th><td>Stackless Python</td></tr><tr><th>OS:</th><td>Inferno</td></tr><tr><th>License:</th><td>Open Source</td></tr><tr><th>Website:</th><td>http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/limbo.html</td></tr>

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 Dennis Ritchie, 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).

1 Language features
2 Examples
- 2.1 Hello world
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] 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.

[edit] Examples

Limbo uses Pascal style definitions (minus the VAR keyword) as in:

name := type value;
name0,name1 : type = value;
name2,name3 : type;
name2 = value;

[edit] Hello world

implement Command;

include "sys.m";
    sys: Sys;

include "draw.m";

include "sh.m";

init(nil: ref Draw->Context, nil: list of string)
{
    sys = load Sys Sys->PATH;
    sys->print("Hello World!\n");
}