- Ada (programming language)
- Limbo (programming language)
- Oberon-2 (programming language)
- D Programming Language
- The BitC Programming Language
Even Common Lisp was used before: MovitzMany of those have at least the same capabilities as C. Some even surpass C++. And arguably some can in theory even produce more efficient compiled binaries. Ada certainly focusses a lot on security and stability by orders of magnitude more than C/C++ does - which is one thing very paramount in systems, especially the kernel.
I guess the biggest reason is popularity. Most OS's are huge, so you need lots of team members working on separate portions of the kernel. At least if you want to make something remotely competitive to Windows/OSX/Linux in a reasonable time frame. So finding enough experts in such languages might be an issue. Not to mention, the much more prevalent example resources available for C based systems programming.
Most systems programming these days is more in the line of extending / altering / fixing existing systems. Very few truly "new" systems are in general use, actually there is nothing new in any of the main-stream OS's in use these days. Even OSX is based on Unix (BSD kernel) - one of the oldest OS's in use today. Windows (on the NT kernel) is based originally on VMS - so also several decades to the root of its ancestry. And most of these are already very tied to C, so it becomes more difficult to create these extensions / fixes in some other language.
I guess the biggest reason is popularity. Most OS's are huge, so you need lots of team members working on separate portions of the kernel. At least if you want to make something remotely competitive to Windows/OSX/Linux in a reasonable time frame. So finding enough experts in such languages might be an issue. Not to mention, the much more prevalent example resources available for C based systems programming.
Most systems programming these days is more in the line of extending / altering / fixing existing systems. Very few truly "new" systems are in general use, actually there is nothing new in any of the main-stream OS's in use these days. Even OSX is based on Unix (BSD kernel) - one of the oldest OS's in use today. Windows (on the NT kernel) is based originally on VMS - so also several decades to the root of its ancestry. And most of these are already very tied to C, so it becomes more difficult to create these extensions / fixes in some other language.
Regards
Sheenu Singla
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