I wasn't implying that there's C specific hardware, or that there's any technical restriction for shipping a C compiler with a chip. You're just reiterating my

I wasn't implying that there's C specific hardware, or that there's any technical restriction for shipping a C compiler with a chip. You're just reiterating my point about it being crowd effect. Also, when talking about systems programming, we can't just limit our scope to linux - there's hundreds of other kernel projects, and embedded systems which don't have the luxury of a massive portable codebase already - they only have a basic C compiler, library, debugger. Using a different language doesn't eliminate C, because chances are, the compiler you're using for that language has been written in C, because it's all the manufacturer supplied. Compiler vendors contribute to this cycle by expecting their compiler to run on any platform if they write it in C. I was suggesting that if we want to liberate ourselves from C, we need the hardware vendors on board too - since they're where the cycle begins. Of course, you don't need the vendor specific compiler if you have a cross compiler, and can build a different language compiler from another platform - however, if you look at what's available for doing that, there's nothing other than GCC - which is why new languages are unlikely to replace C as the defacto systems language, unless they can replicate that functionality.