Re: OOP Language for OS Development

[Christopher Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org>]

Oops! Berend de Boer <berend@xsol.com> was seen spray-painting on a wall:
>>>>>> "Brian" == Brian Heilig <heilig@iname.com> writes:
>
>     Brian> is probably the show stopper.  I'm pretty sure it is
>     Brian> impossible to write an entire OS completely in
>     Brian> Eiffel. 
>
> You can't do it in C either. You always need a bit of assember to
> access the hardware.

The challenge in any language is that you need to build several things
that require "stepping outside the language."

- As you say, there's a need to get at assembler procedures in order
  to access hardware.

- There's a need to manage context switching, to manage processes;
  that likely mandates some assembler.  The fact that some languages
  support threading is unhelpful, because that normally requires
  some "outside context." 

- Ditto for memory management; the more the language integrates that,
  the more difficult it is likely to be to use the language to 
  implement memory management.

C is pretty good for the purpose since its primitives _aren't_ much
more than a sort of "high level assembly language."

Languages that assume a garbage-collected memory management scheme are
likely to be particularly challenging ways to do this...
-- 
let name="cbbrowne" and tld="cbbrowne.com" in String.concat "@" [name;tld];;
http://cbbrowne.com/info/advocacy.html
"Those who doubt the importance  of  a convenient notation should  try
writing a LISP interpreter in COBOL  or doing long division with Roman
numerals." -- Hal Fulton