I've posted about this on HN before, but I'm a TA for an OS course in one of the best colleges in India, where this year we switched to a pedagogic OS written i

I've posted about this on HN before, but I'm a TA for an OS course in one of the best colleges in India, where this year we switched to a pedagogic OS written in Java. It's gone off remarkably well, since students don't have to deal with random memory safety issues within the kernel itself (they of course need to deal with memory safety issues with user-mode programs). As compensation, we've felt comfortable having the assignments cover a lot more ground than they used to when we used C++. In my opinion, C and C++ are very difficult languages to be able to reason about code in, since there's just so much stuff around the operative part of the code. Java, while not ideal, is a lot easier.