[andreiw]

There's a big difference to hiding and simply not knowing about. If you write a kernel you will need to write architecture-specific primitives (and some non-quite-primitive code, since you bring up SMP) to deal with all the categories you mentioned and some more. Regardless of the language. There is no magic language for writing kernels with a fat runtime to hide the gory details.

C is a nice wrapper around assembly. In a few cases, you wish it were a bit better specified to control the actual assembly/ABI binding a bit better. The problem I see is a lack of contract enforcement which makes introducing hard to diagnose bugs really easy. Maybe Rust will fill the gap.