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Comment by elchief | Hacker News Reader

The browser you're using to read this is written in C++, on your C++ or C OS, talking to a web server written in C.

Unless you are using the last couple versions of Firefox which has entire subsystems written in Rust now, as the easiest counter-example.

Also, the important bits of the HN "web server" are the business logic that makes HN HN, and that is written in a Lisp dialect.

Even if there weren't counter-examples: are the languages that browsers, OSes, and web servers written in somehow more important than any other languages? Are browsers/OSes/web servers the best emblems of reliability engineering to you? There are a lot of interesting assumptions at play here.

> Are browsers/OSes/web servers the best emblems of reliability engineering to you?

Since so many people depend on them, I'd say yes. It's extremely obvious to users when they don't work, so I'd assume there's a lot of work put into making them reliable.

Other than HaikuOS, I can't think of any other real-world kernel written in C++. Linux, all BSDs, Windows NT, Hurd are all C. I'm not sure but I think XNU is C as well (the wiki lists it as C/C++).

While the kernel is C, I believe that most of the windows OS is written in C++.

XNU is basically all C, with a bit of C++ for IOKit if I remember correctly.

The new Zircon kernel now from Google fuchsia is being coded in C++ with some C interface for user program.

Giving the great design it have and the leverage of Google on mobile phones, it will probably get a massive deployment in the future.

> talking to a web server written in C

The HN web server and application are written in a dialect of Lisp, unless something has changed.

I meant the SQLite.org server

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