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Comment by jcelerier | Hacker News Reader

> C++ was discussed as having too many undesirable characteristics.

C++ allowed the Serenity OS people to produce an entire OS with a GUI stack able to play Diablo and their own web browser in something like two years. It's depressing to think where we could be today in terms of OS if the Linux and GNU people weren't as insistent on their hate of C++

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Note that Serenity OS also has its own stdlib "AK" that excludes a lot of criticized C++ "features". If the Linux devs were to carefully splice out the Good from the Bad and Ugly of C++, then maybe it'd suit their tastes just fine. I think the bigger factor here is that Linux became decidedly anti-C++ back when C++ was actually pretty crumby.

The Linux kernel has its own libc-ish too.

Why is c++ necessary? Shouldn't any programing language be able to do the same things. Maybe with different amounts of code

Sure, as my prof once noted, "Why, with the assembler you just need to type more!"

You must have had one of those progressive professors who did not consider assemblers "a waste of a valuable scientific computing instrument [...] to do clerical work": http://worrydream.com/dbx/

I love historical anecdotes like this. Goes to show that we should always be questioning our status quo and thinking bigger.

Please write a JavaScript program that will not deploy to your production system if you accidentally pass a string to any function that expects an integer.

So… typescript?

Because it's better.

Simple question, simple answer. Using C is purely an act of risk-aversion, contrarianism, and fashion.

You could build Serenity in C in a similar about of time

What are the arguments towards this ?

Perhaps someone could, but I certainly couldn't. :)

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