First time about TAO, was in EDGE magazine in the early 90s IIRC about their OS TAOS sounded something from the future , could run on different processor even over a network, they had it running on a machine using transputers. It looked like sci-fi to me.
What do you see as significant advantages of Dis over WASM? [edit: my guess would be channel support, but it would be interesting to hear more about that]
Its not so much dis but the whole concept of an OS built on top of a VM. This means the entirety of user space is portable across platforms. There is no way to run native code.
It is possible to port wasm to inferno and replace dis. That could open up some interesting possibilities. You could write code in any language, spit out wasm and run it on any cpu/OS via inferno.
> J2ME, Windows Phone 7, watchOS and Android are arguably the closest to it in mainstream computing.
From my pointy of view none of these come close. The interesting part of Inferno is that it only runs Dis code. It can not exec native code. All the platforms you listed save for j2me (which is not anything like inferno save for being a vm) are OS's which run native code or exec a vm.
The Xerox PARC machines used a microcoded CPU, where the required interpreter was loaded before Smalltalk, Mesa, Mesa/Cedar, Interlisp-D.
Pascal USCD computers used mostly an interpreter, with exception of Convex Computer, which also had AOT compilation.
IBM i and z/OS have language environments, which has allowed several applications to survive multiple hardware generations without ever being recompiled, besides the AOT done at installation time.
Windows Phone 7, only allowed for Silverlight and XNA based games, native code was reserved to Microsoft.
WatchOS uses Apple's special bitcode flavour.
Inferno also executes native code, kernel and Dis implementation.
