Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by comatose_kid | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

comatose_kid·

Do you have any examples where C++ has been used as a systems programming language? I thought C held that role.

View on HN

oddly enough, a good chunk of OS/400 was written in C++ - http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=226239.226253&coll...

Much of the examples on Stroustrup's page qualify as systems code: http://www.research.att.com/~bs/applications.html.

A high profile, recent example is Google's MapReduce: http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html.

Actually, they don't. Neither the MapReduce nor nearly all items on Stroustrup's list fall under conventional definition of the "system programming". It is an established term that does not mean programming of a system. It is rather a synonym of the "OS development".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_programming

I include it to mean support software that sits between the OS and applications, like a runtime system or a memory allocator. Much of that code (and MapReduce) qualify.

Symbian os is coded in c++

Another example is (was ?) NuMega's DriverStudio framework for developing Windows drivers in C++. Both examples are more of an exception rather than a rule though.

Here's a lovely discussion from few years back: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/27/21102...

I didn't know that - thanks.

BeOS was C++

not the kernel! it was very strictly C-only, no C++ allowed. the application frameworks were in C++, but that's not really the "operating system."

and i'm in a position to know. i actually worked at Be for awhile.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com