Re: OOP Language for OS Development

From: Christopher Browne (cbbrowne_at_acm.org)
Date: 04/26/04 

Date: 26 Apr 2004 04:17:16 GMT

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... 

-- 
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