5 ms·

D and Zig could work.

• gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Nobody really proposed these in earnest. Also, it’s a kernel, where diversity of programming languages is a nightmare. It’s not the kernel’s job to support every language people want - it’s just that Rust has enough going for it that it’s finally being considered worthwhile after years of investigation.
• infogulch 5y ago
  Insofar as they don't bundle a runtime (unlike the languages mentioned by GP), yes. But they don't really offer much above C in the area of resource tracking / safety that rust's novel ownership+lifetimes system provides.
  • floatboth 5y ago
    Heh, there were plans to add ownership&borrowing to D: https://dlang.org/blog/2019/07/15/ownership-and-borrowing-in-d/ https://dlang.org/blog/2019/07/15/ownership-and-borrowing-in... but of course bolting something on as an option is not the same as having the whole language designed strictly around it.
  • dralley 5y ago
    I would say "defer" and "errdefer" do offer a lot compared to C, but you're right that it's not comparable with the resource tracking in Rust.
• loeg 5y ago
  Zig isn’t substantially older than Rust, and is arguably less compelling. Certainly fewer resources backing an attempt at use as a 2nd kernel language. D I think suffered from a proprietary compiler and wide use of GC. But I’m not really familiar with it.
  • sanxiyn 5y ago
    D is upstream in GCC since 2019, so it is actually superior to Rust in that respect. Days of proprietary D compiler is long past.
  • nicoburns 5y ago
    Zig is actually quite a bit younger than Rust. The first release of Zig predates the 1.0 release of Rust by a few months, but that was also a pre-release version. The earliest versions of Rust predate Zig by around 4 years.
    • loeg 5y ago
      Sure; I should have said: "Unlike D, Zig isn't substantially older than Rust..."
    • ksec 5y ago
      Yes. Zig started in 2016 Feb, Rust started in 2006 and pre-Alpha 0.1 release in January 2012. ( Needless to say the design Rust and borrow checker is way more complicated )
• badsectoracula 5y ago
  Free Pascal too. An example would be Ultibo[0] which, despite the completely awful site (in terms of learning what it is - it feels like a developer's cynical overjaded idea of how a modern site that tries to market something is supposed to look like), is an OS for Rasberry Pi written in Free Pascal. It is meant to be used as a base for purpose-built projects instead of a general purpose OS, but it does show that it is possible to make one using the language (it already supports pretty much all "standard" features like networking, threads, 2d/3d graphics, a few filesystems, etc). Of course it doesn't make much sense to use it in the Linux kernel but it is a low level (or low level capable) programming language that can be used for systems programming. [0] https://ultibo.org/ https://ultibo.org/
  • retrac 5y ago
    As an historical note, Pascal was very popular in the late 70s and 80s for systems programming. The entire Apple Lisa/Macintosh platform started out in Pascal, for example. The limits of Pascal led Apple to team up with Wirth and develop Object Pascal, which is basically the language Free Pascal implements now. The gap between Pascal with a couple extensions and C, or between Object Pascal and Objective-C, is very small, anyway. Most semantic elements have a one-to-one correspondence. There were even UNIX clones written in Pascal.
    • Tozen 5y ago
      Very true. Many people don't realize how Pascal evolved into Object Pascal, and how it's such a strong alternative to C++, C#, Objective-C, Java, etc...