What can you "new"

[Nick Sabalausky]

"grauzone" <none at example.net> wrote in message 
news:gqh4su$2cbo$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 2:49 PM, grauzone <none at example.net> wrote:
>>> Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 1:33 PM, Nick Sabalausky <a at a.a> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Besides, I'd think an OS written in D would certainly have the 
>>>>> potential
>>>>> to
>>>>> really shake up the current OS market. Not because people would say 
>>>>> "Oh,
>>>>> wow, it's written in D", of course, but because the developers would 
>>>>> have
>>>>> a
>>>>> far easier time making it, well, good.
>>>> *cough*www.xomb.org*cough*
>>> Your point? Yes, we know that D can be used to write hobby kernels.
>>
>> No need to be hostile about it.  I was just letting Nick know.
>
> It will never "shake up the current OS market", though. Also, I think the 
> programming language is not really relevant for how good an OS is. Linux 
> is doing fine with C. This too should probably go rather towards Nick.

Choice of language can certainly make a big difference in a product, OS or 
otherwise. For instance, (purely hypothetical example that conveniently 
ignores timeframe and overhead involved in porting to a different language) 
if Win98 had been written in something like C#, it would have been more 
reliable, released sooner (probably would have been "Win97" as originally 
intended), and required more memory and processing power to run. If OSX had 
been written in pure asm, it would have been leaner, faster, buggier, 
released later, and probably wouldn't have been ported to x86. If early 
versions of the PalmOS kernel were written Python, the old PalmPilots 
probably would have been painfuly slow.

Doesn't matter what you're making, OS or not, the choice of language 
*certainly* carries repercussions throughout a project. Sure Linux is doing 
fine with C. So what? It could probably be doing a lot better with D.

Also, I should emphasize that I never said D would or wouldn't "shake up the 
OS market", just that the potential was there, whether it be *if* a new OS 
was built ground-up in D or *if* an existing one was ported. My main point 
was just that D could certainly improve the overall development process of 
whatever OS used it, allowing things to advance faster, be more reliable, 
etc., and thus potentially give it a real leg up.

If all the carpenters are building houses with wooden hammers, and Joe Shmoe 
comes along with his metal hammer, well, he may succeed or he may fail, but 
he would certainly have that extra advantage, and thus have at least the 
potential to "shake things up".