Interesting question. I'm always curious at these other operating systems.
I was a teen at the time, but in hindsight, in '96-97 'open source' from commercial vendors wasn't the norm, and Lucent finding income from openInferno would've been big change in business model.
Java was meant to be familiar to C/C++ programmers, of which there were a lot. I'm not sure how Limbo would compare in terms of learning / productivity. And would there have been a Windows native "Inferno/Limbo" IDE type thing. (If there was one, please let me know)
Inferno would've needed a killer app. I assume it'd perform better than Java, and at the time it would've competed with small Java applets. Java desktop didn't happen, I recall Corel trying and failing to port Word Perfect to Java.
I don't know how if anybody ever tried to write an office suite in Limbo.
Inferno is based on plan 9 (shares kernel code)with a user space that fully runs in the VM. However, it can run on very small systems like microcontrollers and someone is currently actively exploring this: https://dboddie.gitlab.io/inferno-diary/index.html
I was a teen at the time, but in hindsight, in '96-97 'open source' from commercial vendors wasn't the norm, and Lucent finding income from openInferno would've been big change in business model.
Java was meant to be familiar to C/C++ programmers, of which there were a lot. I'm not sure how Limbo would compare in terms of learning / productivity. And would there have been a Windows native "Inferno/Limbo" IDE type thing. (If there was one, please let me know)
Inferno would've needed a killer app. I assume it'd perform better than Java, and at the time it would've competed with small Java applets. Java desktop didn't happen, I recall Corel trying and failing to port Word Perfect to Java. I don't know how if anybody ever tried to write an office suite in Limbo.