9ferno on Windows 10 64-bit?

[Mart Zirnask]

Hello,
I'm aware of the 9ferno which should build on 64-bit Linux.
Has anybody maybe also ported it to 64-bit Windows 10?

As a side note -- I followed and used (as a geeky end-user) Inferno around 2015-2018, and I'm probably aware of the often-cited decade-or-so old blog posts, repos etc regarding the system (with IPN being one of my favorite "tech" blogs of all time :). But has there been any noteworthy developments in the last 5 or so years?

I feel somewhat embarrassed to ask this, because, as an end-user, I'm sadly not capable enough to provide patches for a 64-bit Windows port etc. But, being largely stuck in a Windows box in the near future, I found myself re-reading stuff about Inferno, and realized what a nice system it actually is. So it's kind of surprising to note that while e.g. 9front has a very active following these days, this does not seem to be the case with Inferno, or is such a grim view actually an overstatement?

Thanks and best,
Mart

[da...@boddie.org.uk]

Mart Zirnask wrote:

As a side note -- I followed and used (as a geeky end-user) Inferno around 2015-2018, and I'm probably aware of the often-cited decade-or-so old blog posts, repos etc regarding the system (with IPN being one of my favorite "tech" blogs of all time :). But has there been any noteworthy developments in the last 5 or so years?

Caerwyn (IPN) ported Inferno to the Raspberry Pi Pico: https://github.com/caerwynj/inferno-pico

Richard Miller wrote and ported a RISC-V toolchain to Inferno. It's in the mainline repository, I think, or at least in the GitHub mirror: https://github.com/inferno-os/inferno-os

I did some work on Cortex-M4/7 microcontrollers. I recently nudged the Raspberry Pi port to work on the Pi Zero 2W, using bits of Miller's 9pi and bits of 9front.

[Mart Zirnask]

Thank you for the links! Yeah, I've been very curious about the RPi ports for a long time.
My current focus, however, is to maybe use Inferno as a "sane/escapist environment" inside Windows (I did this very successfully with mostly Acme-SAC a decade or so ago). So, aside of a Win64 port, I was thinking if anybody out there is actually working with Limbo these days. Writing new software or snippets for the OS itself to make it usable for daily tasks. Pretty much what Caerwyn (and mjl) did back in the day.

With even Linux becoming more and more of a hassle (at least when you have a computer where one of the users is a child who also wants to do some gaming), Inferno does seem like a really nice oasis of quiet explorations and introspection :).

Best,
Mart

[Caerwyn Jones]

A little more about recent work.  

I implemented in limbo  the exact cover with colors algorithm from Don Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming Fascicle 5."   It's in this repo: https://github.com/caerwynj/limbo-taocp

In the same repo is a command line debugger. An alternative to wm/debug.  It's crude, but works to set breakpoints, step through code, and view state.   I did this because I'm using inferno without the UI and more like a traditional language runtime for limbo.   I'm using the 9ferno 64 bit version for amd64 so that I don't have to deal with the 32 bit libraries on Linux.  In my fork of 9ferno I've  made changes to handle the larger word size for the debug device to work. The 9ferno 64 bit version also works on arm64 and Android's Termux with Clang and Musl libc (see the Termux branch). I also use it on Raspberry Pi OS 64 bit.

I use scripts like 'mash' in the repo to run dis files from the host's current folder.  Again, I'm treating limbo more like a traditional language compiler and runtime.

I did make some changes to make acme-sac to run on 64bit word size on arm64.  But I haven't tried on Windows.   If I was to try on Windows again I might try using the Msys2 tools.