Alef (programming language)

Alef was a concurrent programming language designed by Phil Winterbottom of Bell Labs as part of the Plan 9 operating system. It implemented the channel-based concurrency model of Newsqueak in a compiled, C-like language with static, strong typing, and first appeared in 1992. It shipped with the first and second editions of Plan 9 but was abandoned during development of the third edition. Rob Pike attributed its demise to its lack of automatic memory management and the difficulty of maintaining a variant language across multiple architectures. Its concurrency model was later reproduced for C in the libthread library, allowing Alef programs such as Acme to be translated.