Looks like Java might have some competition. Perry and others who are concerned that Java has inherent security flaws might want to get a word in with the Bell Labs folks while the project is still in development. Wink

BELL LABS, RITCHIE "DO SIMPLER RIVAL TO JAVA" (February 20th 1995) AT&T Corp's Bell Laboratories is working feverishly on a rival to Sun Microsystems Inc's Java, according to the San Jose Mercury News. The paper reckons that the project has been accorded such a high priority that most of the 10 or so software engineers working on the Plan 9 OS have been pulled off that to get the new language, code-named Inferno, finished.

According to Silicon Valley's local paper, Dennis Ritchie, credited with creating both Unix and C, made a brief reference to Inferno in a speech last Tuesday night at UniForum and was reluctantly persuaded to enlarge on it a little later. He said that while Java has been the beneficiary of a lot of hype, the underlying idea behind it was compelling, but he was worried that Java had become too large and complex; he also suggested that any Bell Labs version would be useful in a wider variety of machines, including future television sets. "Java does not go far enough," he said.

Ritchie did not say how far along Inferno was, and implied that no decision had been made about whether it would ever be brought to market as a product. Bell Labs is of course in the early stages of moving - not physically but in its allegiance - from AT&T to the $20,000m-a-year fledgling Lucent Technologies Inc.