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Comment by Polyisoprene | Hacker News Reader

Apparently no amount of coding standards, reviewing or number of contributors make up for the huge deficiencies of using C. Wondering what the state of open source operating systems would be if they didn’t have to fight the programming language.

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Writing in another language doesn't come close to solving the problem - a modern OS sits between lots of differently-privileged processes and thousands of devices, most of which have DMA access to host memory (and which are thus "memory-unsafe" in any language). On the other hand, C does give you good low-level access, an enormous ecosystem, and a large number of potential contributors.

HN is fond of blaming C, but seldom has any awareness of why almost everything does use C. This is not to say that C is perfect, but replacing it needs deep expertise in the fields in which C is still dominant.

Which tells me that 1) the deficiencies are minor or 2) the benefits outweigh the deficiencies, or a combination.

Consider that virtually all well-known operating systems, device drivers, embedded systems all over the world use C for some reason, what are you saying would be a better choice?

rust

I looked into rust when it first came out. I dissed it but then found it to be quite interesting. However, compared to C, it is used relatively nowhere by anyone. I don't believe rust has proved to be a non-hesitant replacement for C.

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