Re: Kernel Development & Objective-C

Chris Snook
2007-11-30T15:04:29Z

Ben Crowhurst wrote:
> Has Objective-C ever been considered for kernel development?

No. Kernel programming requires what is essentially assembly language with a
lot of syntactic sugar, which C provides. Higher-level languages abstract away
too much detail to be suitable for the sort of bit-perfect control you need when
you're directly controlling bare metal. You can still use object-oriented
programming techniques in C, and we do this all the time in the kernel, but we
do so with more fine-grained explicit control than a language like Objective-C
would give us. More to the point, if we tried to use Objective-C, we'd find
ourselves needing to fall back to C-style explicitness so often that it wouldn't
be worth the trouble.

In other news, I hear Hurd boots again!

-- Chris