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> GC is the problem there.

It is? That didn't stop Genera, Interlisp, Movitz or Mezzano to name a few. Outside Lisp there's also Smalltalk, Oberon and Singularity to name a few operating systems with GC.

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If an OS has a GC-based kernel, it is automatically inferior to one lacking GC.

That's why the cases you brought up are not used in industrial/production environments in modern times.

But why?

Random pauses and inferior performance

Compared to the other pauses kernels make? Biscuit (POSIX in Go [0]) introduced at worst a pause of 115 microseconds and a slowdown due to GC and safety checks of 15%. But the forementioned systems don't have a kernel/userspace split; Microsoft measured the split made a server 25 to 33% _slower_ [1].

[0] https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/biscuit:login19.pdf

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1178597.1178599

Thanks for the link. Didn't know about this.

Lisp machines are famous, but the complexity of a modern system means that even with a perfect kernel, you couldn't get any peripherals to work.

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