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steve1977

From here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10006411

"At some stage in the future we may be able to move IOKit over to a good programming language"

IOKit was almost done in Java; C++ was the engineering plan to stop that from happening.

Remember: there was a short window of time where everyone thought Java was the future and Java support was featured heavily in some of the early OS X announcements.

Also DriverKit's Objective-C model was not the same as userspace. As I recall the compiler resolved all message sends at compile time. It was much less dynamic.

Mostly because they thought Objective-C wasn't going to land well with the Object Pascal / C++ communities, given those were the languages on Mac OS previously.

To note that Android Things did indeed use Java for writing drivers, and on Android since Project Treble, and the new userspace driver model since Android 8, that drivers are a mix of C++, Rust and some Java, all talking via Android IPC with the kernel.

There was also the Java-like syntax for ObjC but I don’t think that ever shipped.

> there was a short window of time where everyone thought Java was the future

Makes me think of how plists in macOS are xml because back then xml was the future

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