[dralley]

>Or systemd, written in a memory unsafe language (yes, that is a problem for something so critical and was already exploited at least a couple of times)

What memory safe language 1) existed in 2010 and 2) is thoroughly portable to every architecture people commonly run Linux on and 3) is suitable for software as low-level as the init?

Rust is an option now but it wasn't back then. And Rust is being evaluated now, even though it's not quite ready yet on #2.

[sofixa]

Go, although with it's GC it's debatable to what extent it's suitable for very low level software.

And honestly the language choice was only the tip of the iceberg, it took years of people adapting before systemd became usable. And it still doesn't handle circular dependencies better than arbitrarily which is ridiculous, literally one of it's main jobs is to handle dependencies.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

There's Ada.

[dralley]

Ada has no ecosystem, and a lot of the ecosystem that does exist is proprietary, and it brings us back to point #2.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> Ada has no ecosystem, and a lot of the ecosystem that does exist is proprietary,

Not no ecosystem, but yes it's way smaller... probably even smaller than Rust, yes.

> and it brings us back to point #2.

I seriously doubt it. Ada is supported directly in gcc; why would it have any worse platform coverage than anything else?

[freedomben]

it would be fun if we could simulate the world where systemd was written in Ada and then read all the comments/criticism