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this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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Programming
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While I get your point that Python is often not the most appropriate language to write certain parts of an OS, I have to object to the supposed necessity of C. In particular, the bolded claim that an OS not written in C is still going to have C involved.
Such an OS could instead have written its non-native parts using assembly. And while C was intentionally designed to be similar to assembly, it is not synonymous with assembly. OS authors can and do write assembly when even the C language cannot do what they need, and I gave an example of this in my comment.
The primacy of C is not universal, and has a strong dependency on the CPU architecture. Indeed, there's a history of building machines which are intended for a specific high-level language, with Lisp Machines being one of the most complex -- since Lisp still has to be compiled down to some sort of hardware instructions. A modern example would be Java, which defines the programming language as well as the ISA and byte code: embedded Java processors were built, and thus there would have been zero need for C apart from legacy convenience.
Agreed! That's a great point!
I appreciate your clarification. Not everything has to run C. It's just a trend in today's products.
I was attempting to humorously reference Monty Python's Spam sketch, where it seems like everything on the menu has at least a little Spam in it. Every device I could think of, that I've toyed with enough to guess what it has running, is running at least a bit of C.
For an attempt at a counterpoint, I thought of a few devices, like my PineWatch, that run an OS codes entirely written in one language. But... That one language is, of course, C.
Yeah. I think legacy convenience is, indeed, why there's C in so many places, even places it doesn't have to be.
There's so many folks with so much hardware driver expertise in C, and they teach our next generation, so I figure that will continue until something really compelling changes their preference.
I appreciate your point. There are lots of non-C ways to create bytecode. My (amused) point is that we don't seem very fond of any of those methods, today.