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Comment by itistoday | Hacker News Reader

The premise is that because Windows Mobile does not allow, and Android makes it very difficult to run C code, that therefore "C might be on a decline as the universal programming language." (He incorrectly states that the iPhone "only" allows Objective-C). That's not very convincing.

Until Apple, Microsoft, Google and others start writing their operating systems in Java/C# instead of C, I wouldn't worry.

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Writing the OS in C doesn't mean that the main apis are in C. That's the point. I can't compile my favorite language on android and easily access the main android apis like I always could in the past.

He specifically mentioned the difficulty with things like erland, couchdb, and firefox.

> Until Apple, Microsoft, Google and others start writing their operating systems in Java/C# instead of C, I wouldn't worry.

Keep in mind the runtimes those languages require is written in some flavor of C. Even with Squeak, where the VM is written in a subset of Smalltalk, it's transformed into C and then compiled to run natively.

Having said that, I have, long, long ago, designed a stack-based architecture that would run something very close to Forth. Got me an A+.

Microsoft did write their an OS in C# though, and who knows, it might rear it's head again someday.

Microsoft's plan was to build most of Longhorn on managed code. For what was publicly said, it became clear that plan didn't work out, they had to scrap most of what was written up to then and start from more or less scratch. Vista was released late as a result, Jim Alchin retired and the same codebase lived on to become Windows 7.

Lisp machines, I think, proved the concept that, if your CPU is clever enough, even the low-level code can retain a high-level of abstraction.

Sadly, I have none to play with. Someday I intend to correct that.

They are still attempting to do this with Midori: https://careers.microsoft.com/JobDetails.aspx?jid=8160

"The Technical Strategy Incubation team is looking for a senior software architect to lead development of the Kernel for a novel operating system. Because this is an incubation, the candidate must have a high tolerance for uncertainty. Experience in startups is a plus.

Our Kernel is a non-traditional design divided between a native C++ microKernel and additional managed C# operating system functionality which is injected into each independent hardware address space. The system uses lightweight isolation and capabilities as the basis for security, is built from the ground up for safe concurrency, and enforces unusual principles like "no unsafe shared memory." ..."

You can currently download Singularity, which works but isn't polished enough or Windows-compatible; Midori's rumored to be a project to adapt Singularity into something that could become a future version of the Windows product (though there are also other rumors).

http://singularity.codeplex.com/

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