[rbanffy]

"There's no question that Linux should be written in a low level language"

In the early days, the fact Unix was written in C was quite remarkable. At that time, OSs were written in hand-optimized assembly language.

I see no reason to stay with C-level languages (C was once called high-level) if we can make compilers that translate them into machine code that's faster than hand-optimized assembly.

Smalltalk/80 and the various Lisp machines are sufficient proof whole environments, from kernel to GUI, can be written in higher-than-C-level languages, provided the machine is fast enough. If we can extract speed from compilers and not from expensive silicon, I see no reason not to do it.

In a couple days I will attend to a lecture on porting the Squeak VM to FPGAs and running Smalltalk on silicon. That should be interesting.

[malkia]

But those machines (Smalltalk, Lisp) had dedicated HW dealing with gc, special instructions, etc.

[stcredzero]

I remember being a fly on the wall at a discussion between several very smart VM guys at Camp Smalltalk maybe 7 or 8 years ago. (VisualWorks, Smalltalk/X, Smalltalk Agents, Squeak, Dolphin.) Apparently, there's a lot of stuff chip makers could put in to general-purpose processors to generically support High Level languages. I think it's high time we had some of this, given the prevalence of Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP (yes, it would benefit them too).

[rbanffy]

Cannot edit, but I left the link to the presentation out: http://fisl.vidanerd.com/palestra/30