Hacker News Reader

Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

I think anyone's opinion on what makes something "systems programming" has a lot to do with what it meant when they learned the term. The quotes from Stroustrup and Alexandrescu, for example, very much call out language features.

View on HN

Right. They confuse "system programming languages" with "system programming"

There are languages that are clearly better suited for systems programming. You might call these "systems programming languages." Would you write a file system driver in PHP?

> There are languages that are clearly better suited for systems programming. You might call these "systems programming languages." Would you write a file system driver in PHP?

I wouldnt but that sounds like something we would all read about on HN.

The latest version of PHP comes with FFI, so I suspect that's coming :)

Openstack was written in python...

Personally I use go for everything.

Isn't garbage collection the problem for being in the system programming?

No. It might be a problem for real-time systems, which are a subset. For example, storage systems would do fine.

Not necessarily. There have been real-world operating systems that employed garbage collectors (e.g., Oberon, Genera).

No, that is a common myth from the GC-hate crowd.

Here is some stuff to get you started,

"The Cedar Programming Environment: A Midterm Report and Examination "

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/33ff/212245ff8af0359e911883...

http://www.projectoberon.com/

http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/wiki/Documentation/Front

https://www.whoishostingthis.com/resources/modula-3/

http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programmi...

I'm sure you could probably get that to work with FUSE.

I actually wrote a filesystem driver in Perl using FUSE for my final year of university. It seemed like it would be much less painful when it crashed, given that the objective was to prototype an idea rather than ship a product.

You can write a user level filesystem in any programming language if it can talk the 9p protocol!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com