From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S935182AbXK3PE3 (ORCPT ); Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:04:29 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932875AbXK3PEW (ORCPT ); Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:04:22 -0500 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([66.187.233.31]:40870 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932459AbXK3PEV (ORCPT ); Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:04:21 -0500 Message-ID: <47502595.4020007@redhat.com> Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:00:37 -0500 From: Chris Snook User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 (X11/20071115) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Ben.Crowhurst@stellatravel.co.uk CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Kernel Development & Objective-C References: <474EAD18.6040408@stellatravel.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <474EAD18.6040408@stellatravel.co.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Ben Crowhurst wrote: > Has Objective-C ever been considered for kernel development? No. Kernel programming requires what is essentially assembly language with a lot of syntactic sugar, which C provides. Higher-level languages abstract away too much detail to be suitable for the sort of bit-perfect control you need when you're directly controlling bare metal. You can still use object-oriented programming techniques in C, and we do this all the time in the kernel, but we do so with more fine-grained explicit control than a language like Objective-C would give us. More to the point, if we tried to use Objective-C, we'd find ourselves needing to fall back to C-style explicitness so often that it wouldn't be worth the trouble. In other news, I hear Hurd boots again! -- Chris