[martanne]

The nice thing about the pointer as mark thingy is that while the offset from the start of the file might change when something is inserted before it, the pointer will remain the same.

Anyway this was just an example. I agree that higher level languages (including functional ones) have their own merit. If I would start again today I might consider Rust. But again the LLVM dependency seems kind of scary.

Again for me an ideal base system is built upon a kernel, libc (musl), C compiler (cparser/libfirm), coreutils (sbase/ubase, toybox, busybox), editor (vis) etc. Writing a C compiler is non-trivial, but doable. Creating a C++ compiler on the other hand ...

A self contained (including terminfo entries etc), statically linked vis binary weights in at around ~800K. This allows usage in resource constrained sytems, I don't think the same would be possible using e.g. Haskell.

[pka]

Fair enough - if portability to systems without much more than a C compiler is a project goal, than C is obviously a good (the only?) choice :)