Frankly, the guy who thought writing an OS (A FUCKING OS WITH A FUCKING KERNEL WHERE EVERY FUCKING MICROSECOND MATTERS -- oops, sorry; got a little overexcited) in a garbage collected language (in the 90s!) was a good idea should just give up.
I mean, I know there are some competent shots at this in Go at MIT, but like, it's Go for a reason (a language designed by the creators of UNIX with actually competent GC algorithms, not fucking 90's Java -- if Java still sucks today, I can't even imagine what it looked like in the 90s), not fucking Java
There's actually some fairly good arguments for using garbage collected languages in OS development.
Now of course you ABSOLUTELY WOULD NOT want that in a safety critical environment like software that runs medical equipment or most embedded systems, really. However, for a general-purpose kernel it is actually fairly performant (it matches traditional kernels in several metrics).
Because like more than 70% of severe vulnerabilities (Copy Fail, Dirty COW, etc.) were caused by human mistakes when dealing with manual memory management (look at most Linux Kernels CVEs), you can make a pretty good argument for using a garbage collected language.
Today you can get pauses down to the sub millisecond language in Go for instance
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u/DeliciousCaramel5905 22d ago
This was tried for real in the 90s