Complete Development Environment
Unlike many embedded operating systems, Inferno is a complete environment within which all application development may be done. The system comes with the Acme IDE, compiler and graphical debugger as well as full source code for the kernel and all applications. Furthermore, because Inferno can also run as an application on top of Windows, Linux and UNIX, you can develop your applications on the platform you choose with the knowledge that it will work on any target device running Inferno.

Portable Applications
Inferno applications are written in Limbo, a modern, safe, modular, concurrent programming language with C-like syntax and advanced interprocess synchronisation and communication facilities. It is more powerful than C but considerably easier to understand and debug than C++ or Java. Limbo code is compiled to produce Dis, an architecture independent bytecode which is then interpreted (or compiled on the fly) on the target processor. Limbo applications are completely portable across any platform running Inferno.

Porting
Porting Inferno to a new device based on one of the supported architectures is relatively simple compared to many operating systems. The Inferno kernel has been designed with a small, well defined interface between the parts of the system which are platform specific and those which are platform independent. The platform specific elements are essentially the parts of the device drivers which directly interact with and control the physical hardware. Device drivers are all written in C. Once support for the hardware devices has been provided, the compilation of the remainder of the kernel is straight forward.

Compilers
Inferno comes with a C cross-compiler suite originally developed by Bell Labs. The compiler suite is extremely compact (around 12,000 lines of code per architecture) and yet produces code that is comparable in terms of size and effeciency with much larger packages. The Inferno kernel and device drivers are all written in C.

Your Requirements
Vita Nuova can help you with all aspects of your embedded systems and applications development including: training, design and implementation. Contact us to discuss your requirements.