Limbo - Programming language

Limbo is an open source programming language created in 1995 by Rob Pike.

#614on PLDB

29Years Old

529Repos

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 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. Read more on Wikipedia...

Tags: programming language
There are at least 529 Limbo repos on GitHub
Early development of Limbo happened in https://groups.google.com/g/inferno-os
The Google BigQuery Public Dataset GitHub snapshot shows 360 users using Limbo in 367 repos on GitHub
Explore Limbo snippets on Rosetta Code
Limbo on HOPL
Limbo appears in the TIOBE Index
Pygments supports syntax highlighting for Limbo
See also: (10 related languages) C, Pascal, CSP, ALEF, Newsqueak, Stackless Python, Go, Rust, Ada, ISBN

Example from the web:

Lock: module
{
	PATH:	con "/dis/lib/lock.dis";

	Semaphore: adt {
		c: chan of int;
		obtain:	fn(nil: self ref Semaphore);
		release: fn(nil: self ref Semaphore);
		new: fn(): ref Semaphore;
	};
	
	init: fn();
};

Example from Riju:

implement Cmd;

include "sys.m";
include "draw.m";

Cmd : module {
    init : fn (ctxt : ref Draw->Context, args : list of string);
};

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

Example from hello-world:

implement Hello;

include "sys.m";
	sys: Sys;
include "draw.m";

Hello: module
{
	init:	fn(ctxt: ref Draw->Context, argv: list of string);
};

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

Example from the Hello World Collection:

Hello World in Limbo.
Limbo is the programming language of the Inferno OS
(from Lucent Bell Labs).


implement Cmd;

include "sys.m";
include "draw.m";

Cmd : module {
    init : fn (ctxt : ref Draw->Context, args : list of string);
};

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

Example from Wikipedia:

implement Command;
 
 include "sys.m";
     sys: Sys;
 

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

Language features

Feature	Supported	Example	Token
Print() Debugging	✓		sys->print
Semantic Indentation	X