On Tuesday, 18 November 2014 at 15:36:58 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Tuesday, 18 November 2014 at 14:56:42 UTC, Paulo Pinto
wrote:
Since when do developers use a different systems programming
language than the one sold by the OS vendor?
Who has the pleasure to waste work hours writing FFI wrappers
around SDK tools?
All successful systems programming languages, even if only for
a few years, were tied to a specific OS.
Depends on what you mean by system programming. I posit that
most programs that have been written in C are primarily
application level programs. Meaning that you could factor out
the C component as a tiny unit and write the rest in another
language… Most high level languages provide integration with C.
These things are entirely cultural.
In the 80's almost everything was system programming, even
business applications.
You are forgetting the UNIX factor again.
We only had C available in UNIX systems as compiled language.
HP-UX was the only commercial UNIX I used where we had access to
compilers for other languages.
So who would pay for third party tooling, specially with the way
software used to cost?
Then of course, many wanted to do on their CP/M, Spectrum and
similar systems the type of coding possible at work or
university, which lead to Small C and other C based compilers,
thus spreading the language outside UNIX.
In the late 80s you could do the same stuff in Turbo Pascal as
in C, and integrate with asm with no problem. Lots of decent
software for MSDOS was written in TP, such as BBS server
software dealing with many connections.
I was doing Turbo Pascal most of the time, by the time I learned C
with Turbo C 2.0, Turbo C++ 1.0 was just around the corner and I
only
touched pure C again on teachers and employers request.
On regular micros you didn't have a MMU so there was actually a
great penalty for using an unsafe language even during
development: the OS would reboot (or you would get the famous
guru meditation on Amiga). That sucked.
Amiga was programmed in Assembly. Except for Amos, we didn't use
anything else.
--
Paulo
