| Of course I now had to go dig up the reference due to the flippant Python kernel comparison :) The benefits and costs of writing a POSIX kernel in a high-level language Cody Cutler, M. Frans Kaashoek, Robert T. Morris MIT CSAIL https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi18/presentation/cutler So its from quite a prestigious institution, has at least one big authors, and concludes that it works quite well and recommends it over C for new kernels and VMMs. I also disagree the "no traction" argument about Ada since it's been used in real projects and had a big enough developer community for a long time, and is alive and well. People can surely pick up new programming languages when they join a new project, I know I've done it many times. Tooling licensing should be fine as well since GNAT is available under GPL + Licensing exception, same as Google has been using with GCC since dawn of time, and under the Adacore license which Google probably can afford. So, I hold that there were many other options vs Rust. Including the others in my original comment that we didn't get to in details. Except Kotlin Native, I made a timeline mistake there, it was too early in 2016. |