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> I doubt you could stay within the first ISO C standard and write a modern operating system.

Do you take that view because of some intrinsic deficiency in the language, or the difficulty of memory safety, or something else?

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The C standard has notes about a freestanding implementation, mainly for developing kernels. The requirements C has for freestanding environments are very limited ( http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1570.pdf , you get float.h, iso646.h, limits.h, stdalign.h, stdarg.h, stdbool.h, stddef.h, stdint.h, and stdnoreturn.h) and the starting point for the program is implementation defined; you might get _Atomic, but that’s optional). For the record, C++ goes a little overboard and promises all sorts of things in its freestanding environment.

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.std.c/c/zzyii-DlMiU/m/RnH5i...

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