It seems odd to write a new OS in C at this late date.

SerenityOS is in modern C++, and benefits enormously.

2011 is late? Or are you referring to OSes in general?

Any C program, including an OS kernel and its apparatus, can be transitioned seamlessly to C++ in a day, and then modernized at leisure. Ten years is plenty of time for that.

junon

This is sooooo not true. It might compile with a C++ compiler but they're two entirely different langs and the best code looks very different between the two.

Plus, C++ requires extra setup at the kernel level given the init code. It also requires manually designing your vtables.

Also, verifying C (if you ever go that route) is many times easier than verifying C++.

Also C compiles faster in many cases, easing development.

Plus C doesn't bark at you about certain ASM-isms that are frequently found in kernel code.

Plus C is arguably easier to reason about.

Plus C++ standard library can't be used anyway and auto pointers aren't really that much of a concern at the kernel level

Plus you're doing a lot of init work that never returns thus automatic destructors aren't as useful.

Also C is just fun, and perfectly suited for the task.

pjmlp

> Plus C++ standard library can't be used anyway and auto pointers aren't really that much of a concern at the kernel level

https://github.com/microsoft/wil

"Ah, but that isn't used on the Windows kernel" would be the expected reply, well

https://community.osr.com/discussion/291326/the-new-wil-libr...

"Microsoft's toolchain does not ship a copy of the STL that works in kernel mode. Partly this is because the kernel's CRT doesn't support C++ exceptions. (And partly this is because I/O is wildly different in kernel, so you'd have to rewrite the implementation of all the I/O libraries.)

But for kernel developers, wil ships a subset of an STL implementation. To avoid conflicting with the real STL, it's available under the wistd namespace. The rule of thumb is that wistd::foo is a drop-in replacement for std::foo."