How ISO C became unusable for operating systems development

2021/10/11 by Victor Yodaiken · 2 voices · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Logic, programming, and type systems #Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies #Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques

paper · pdf · doi:10.1145/3477113.3487274

Abstract

The C programming language was developed in the 1970s as a fairly unconventional systems and operating systems development tool, but has, through the course of the ISO Standards process, added many attributes of more conventional programming languages and become less suitable for operating systems development. Operating system programming continues to be done in non-ISO dialects of C. The differences provide a glimpse of operating system requirements for programming languages.

Cited by

• Project-Level C-to-Rust Translation via Synergistic Integration of Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models

Discussions

• ISO C became unusable for operating systems development [hn, 203 points, 475 comments]
• How ISO C became unusable for operating systems development [lobsters, 14 points, 19 comments]

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