[MisterTea]

> The BEAM is fascinating for many reasons, including being register-based. > I really just wish the BEAM was portable in the way the JVM is.

Inferno is both register based and highly portable using the same tool chain as Plan 9 which runs seamlessly across multiple architectures. This eventually evolved into the Go tooling as Rob Pike came up with the Plan 9 design and worked on it with Ken Thompson. https://seh.dev/go-legacy/

Unfortunately Inferno was never fully completed and bit-rotted a bit but it still builds on systems with 32 bit support. There are various forks and even an attempted 64 bit version. To me its a great design as it not only runs on bare metal but also has a hosted option so it runs under Plan 9, Windows, MacOS/Unix/BSD/Linux. Talk about a portable OS...

[ux266478]

To be clear, Inferno is the operating system. The virtual machine is Dis. There exist a few examples[1] of 64-bit Dis, but usually the problem people run into is making the Limbo[2] compiler spit out 64-bit code.

It's rather unfortunate, Inferno is a really nice system with a lot of interesting reference stuff implemented like a typed shell[3]. It's also Plan 9 in a box with all the accoutrements, and knowers will have jumped out of their seat at the implication. I can't understate how cool the Inferno system is.

[1] - https://github.com/Plan9-Archive/9ferno

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_(programming_language)

[3] - https://inferno-os.org/inferno/man/2/alphabet-intro.html

[MisterTea]

I dunno what happened to the 64bit port, the author just up and deleted it with no reason given AFIK. Thankfully someone had a recent clone and uploaded it to the archive.

Limbo is incomplete, forget what exactly but a few people on the 9fans discord recently ran into issues. Always remember, Inferno was forced onto the Labs people by Lucent in an attempt to compete with Sun's Java and built in a year. Bell Labs did not do marketing and Lucent fumbled the whole thing.

Plan 9 in a box is only useful if you MUST use a foreign host like Linux. Otherwise I would much prefer the machine actually run Plan 9.