Apple says the future is C++ and Swift.

Microsoft says the future is a mix of constrained C++ (Core Guidelines), Rust and AOT C#.

Google says the future is C++ and Java (as of Treble) on Android, with Go, C++ and Rust on ChromeOS and Fuchsia.

ARM says C++ on mbed.

GenodeOS says C++ and Ada.

Newton, Symbian, Bada and BeOS used C++.

C is married with UNIX, they were born to each other, other OSes have long followed other paths.

Rust? I know a lot of people evangelise rust — to the point of annoyance of others — but as we move into an era where the entire world is run on computers, it is just not acceptable to have decades old infrastructure susceptible to bugs often caused by someone not understanding undefined or implementation dependent behaviour.

Is still a little early, but as someone who works at the bare metal level, Rust shows early promise.

The features required are still unstable (as in not in the stable version of the compiler), but it’s getting there, and doing it fast.

In any case, firmware behaves a lot like banking software, language change will take time

The Oberon system has drivers in, well, Oberon (which is a high-level Pascal successor with garbage collection). Low-level memory access is done through magical peek/poke functions, in which all the dirtyness is concentrated (and these might not be allowed in user programs - not sure). This means the language as a whole is not littered with unsafe pointers just to service the tiny subset of programs that need them.

pcwalton might have an opinion :). He is Rust lead designer.

D as BetterC !

Zig