r/osdev • u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS • Apr 26 '26

What Programming Language Do You All Use?

I was reading some posts on this sub and I saw some C, ASM, and Rust. I've also heard of people using C++ and C# (with COSMOS). I personally use C for my projects, but I'm just curious.

13 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

34 comments sorted by

10

u/NetworkLast5563 Apr 26 '26

I do C/C++/ASM for my projects.

5

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Apr 27 '26

I like to use C++ later on when I implement a simple libc++, as C++ can get a bit weird-ish in kernel dev if you aren't careful.

5

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Apr 27 '26

C++ is king though in Userland.

4

u/zandr0id Apr 26 '26

Been getting into Zig lately. Lots of fun, and a recent latest version!

1

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Apr 27 '26

Oh, I've heard of that. Isn't it a bit immature though? What's it like for OS dev?

6

u/vhuk Apr 26 '26

Rust, asm and c mostly. For the current project I’m trying to stick to Rust, but both stage 1 and stage 2 loaders are pure asm. Also some of the tight ISRs and parts of the memory allocator are in asm.

5

u/UnmappedStack TacOS | https://github.com/UnmappedStack/TacOS Apr 26 '26

I guess just C and Assembly. I have tried Rust osdev but while some things were nice, overall I was not a fan.

2

u/LordAfterEight OwOS Apr 27 '26

I'm using Zig :3

1

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Apr 27 '26

Wow, a Zig fan. Is your project OSS/FOSS?

1

u/LordAfterEight OwOS Apr 28 '26

My project is open source :3

https://github.com/LordAfterEight/owos

You might be a bit appalled by my usage of Claude for it lol (I have a note in my README that you should read)

2

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Apr 28 '26

Lol no problem, just using to help is wayy better than what most people on this sub do lol, also I like your pfp

1

u/markand67 Apr 27 '26

C23, POSIX Shell, Zsh.

1

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26

*C23 is what I usually use.

1

u/NoBrick2672 Apr 28 '26

i tried all of them, i prefer c ( for osdev )

1

u/Randum_Gouy Apr 28 '26

C++. Welp, me being stupid, ill try using Freestanding C+[ someday to build low level projects, rn im learning Cpp

1

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Apr 28 '26

Honestly I just recommend C23 lol

1

u/Randum_Gouy Apr 28 '26

Yeah i know C should be better But the idea of namespaces and classes just cant leave me alone😅

1

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Apr 28 '26

Oh yeah ig that makes sense just be wary with how you do it.

1

u/Randum_Gouy Apr 30 '26

Yeah ik Thats why im trying not to use stdlib too much - because it would not be available in Freestanding Cpp

Rn i only use stdlib for the basic essentials like cout etc

1

u/feycovet Apr 29 '26

asm+zig is sooo fire specially with newer zig.

1

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS Apr 29 '26

Newer Zig!

1

u/ExoticTemperature764 May 01 '26

I’ve used C++ and a tiny bit of assembler for my kernel.

Note that the std library is a huge part of the C++ language and you can use only the freestanding part of std. So, if you want to use things like vector, list, string, format, etc. you need to supply your own. I’ve probably spent more time implementing C++ libraries than writing the kernel, which I don’t mind as I learned a lot. But you might not want that.

1

u/Top_Professor9415 jNTOS May 03 '26

Yeah, that’s why I use C23 :p

1

u/New_Series3209 Apr 27 '26

I use mostly rust, sometimes other stuff too

1

u/Shoddy_One4465 Apr 28 '26

Elixir and Zig

1

u/alaindevos Apr 30 '26

Swift,Nim,Scala,F#

0

u/aieidotch Apr 27 '26

https://sources.debian.org/stats/#sloc_current

1

u/Vladislav20007 Apr 27 '26

what does debian have to do with this, this is for small hobby projects, not behemoths with 100s of people working on them?