Re: Kernel Development & Objective-C

Lennart Sorensen
2007-12-03T16:53:56Z

On Sat, Dec 01, 2007 at 09:59:31PM +0200, Avi Kivity wrote:
> C also requires a (very minimal) runtime. And I don't see how having a
> runtime disqualifies a language from being usable in a kernel; the
> runtime is just one more library, either supplied by the compiler or by
> the kernel.

Well the majority of C syntax requires no runtime library. There are
some system call like things that you often want that need a library
(like malloc and such), but those aren't really part of C itself. Of
course without malloc and printf and file i/o calls the program would
probably be a bit boring. I have written some small C programs without
a runtime, where the few things I needed where implemented in assembly
and poked the hardware directly and called from the C program.

> Object orientation in C leaves much to be desired; see the huge number
> of void pointers and container_of()s in the kernel.

As a programming language, C leaves much to be desired.

--
Len Sorensen