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> And yet our operating systems are still written in C(++). The last time a mainstream OS was developed from scratch was the late 80's (1989 to 1993), with win
by Joeri 13y ago
> And yet our operating systems are still written in C(++).
The last time a mainstream OS was developed from scratch was the late 80's (1989 to 1993), with windows NT. Linux is just a kernel for an OS from the early 80's (gnu). OS X is a derivative of nextstep, also developed in the second half of the 80's. C was the state of the art back then.
The investment to build a competitive mainstream OS from scratch in a new language is huge. Probably 10x to 100x the effort to build windows nt, which took 250 people 5 years. I think there would be a lot of value in developing an OS in a programming language that deals intrinsically with the topics of security and multi-processing, but at this point it's too expensive to do that and match other OS's feature for feature.
- ahomescu1 13y agoMost of that effort would be spent writing drivers. Writing a scheduler (how many has Linux had so far, 3?), process manager, virtual memory system, simple filesystem and networking (TCP/IP) stack is not that much work. Supporting most existing hardware, however, takes years. EDIT: for an example, compare linux/drivers/ to linux/kernel/ (core kernel code, including process management and scheduling) and linux/mm/ (memory management) in Linux. The former is huge.