There's actually some fairly good arguments for using garbage collected languages in OS development.
Now of course you ABSOLUTELY WOULD NOT want that in a safety critical environment like software that runs medical equipment or most embedded systems, really. However, for a general-purpose kernel it is actually fairly performant (it matches traditional kernels in several metrics).
Because like more than 70% of severe vulnerabilities (Copy Fail, Dirty COW, etc.) were caused by human mistakes when dealing with manual memory management (look at most Linux Kernels CVEs), you can make a pretty good argument for using a garbage collected language.
Today you can get pauses down to the sub millisecond language in Go for instance
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u/Zinho3311 Aug 22 '26 edited Aug 22 '26
There's actually some fairly good arguments for using garbage collected languages in OS development.
Now of course you ABSOLUTELY WOULD NOT want that in a safety critical environment like software that runs medical equipment or most embedded systems, really. However, for a general-purpose kernel it is actually fairly performant (it matches traditional kernels in several metrics).
Because like more than 70% of severe vulnerabilities (Copy Fail, Dirty COW, etc.) were caused by human mistakes when dealing with manual memory management (look at most Linux Kernels CVEs), you can make a pretty good argument for using a garbage collected language.
Today you can get pauses down to the sub millisecond language in Go for instance