Programming in Limbo

Limbo is the application programming language for the Inferno operating system. Although Limbo looks syntactically like C, it has a number of features that make it easier to use, safer and more suited to the heterogeneous, networked Inferno environment: a rich set of basic types, strong typing, garbage collection, concurrency, communications, and modules. Limbo may be interpreted or compiled ´just in time´ for efficient, portable execution. This paper introduces the language by studying an example of a complete, useful Limbo program. The program illustrates general programming as well as aspects of concurrency, graphics, module loading, and other features of Limbo and Inferno.