From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] limbo?
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 28 Feb 2004 14:11:32 +0400."
             <200402281011.i1SABWNP040924@adat.davidashen.net>
From: "Russ Cox" <rsc@swtch.com>
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Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 16:16:18 -0500
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> Novice question: do I need Inferno to program in limbo?
> That is, I know I can if I have (I did on FreeBSD-hosted one).
> But there is no limbo without Inferno under Plan9 too, right?

Geoff is right -- you need Inferno for now.  However, if you want to
do it without Inferno, I have that lying around.  I got the basic
running of modules (including loading "native-code" modules written
in C) working and then stopped.  This required some changes
to the Plan 9 linker in order to create the native-code module
in the first place.  I think these changes are on sources, just
undocumented.  If you wanted to run this on a non-Plan 9 system,
it shouldn't be hard to use the Unix dl interface instead.

The idea was to provide native-code module interfaces to the common
C libraries and have some fun writing Limbo code that interacted
with the OS directly instead of via the Inferno buffer.

The main thing missing is fleshing out the sys module and other
native-code modules.

	http://pdos.lcs.mit.edu/~rsc/dis.tar.gz

The LICENSE in that archive is the VN Liberal Source Licence, since
that's the current Inferno distribution license, but the code base
I used was actually a little earlier (somewhere between 3rd and 4th
edition Inferno).  Almost none of the code is mine -- I just repackaged
the dis interpreter.

Russ