Broken dream of mine :(

[arnuld uttre]

Well, It was sometime ago when Jonathan Shapiro started working on
Coyotos and there was some discussion on mailing lists that Coyotos
may be the next generation microkernel for Hurd. I kept an eye on the
development of Coyoptos and saw that their expectations for Coyotos
forced them to create a new language BitC;
http://www.bitc-lang.org/index.html  which of course, I really liked
and quite impressed with their efforts. A thought struck my mind that
I can use BitC to rewrite Hurd.

I wanted to work on a language which is not designed for PDP-11 but
for modern 32bit hardware. Hardware has come a long way from PDP-11 to
AMD Phenom Gen II but the software is not. So I was very happy on
seeing a technically sane language which included elements from
function programming. Many people will claim that I can think of C++
but personally I am not much of a fan of C++ (I am a fan of Lisp).

Now, I passionately wanted to use a GNU system but after 25 years the
Hurd is still in its nascent stage and now since Shapiro has joined
M$, he has stopped working on Coytoso anymore:
http://www.coyotos.org/pipermail/bitc-dev/2009-April/001784.html .
Seems like Coyotos shares the same future (never to be finished) as of
Hurd.

 How many of you think that using C is still a good idea ?  There is
one concept in Lisp. When we want to do something then we can bend the
language according to our design and that is possible because Lisp is
the programmable programming language. But I can not use Lisp to write
an OS, so BitC was my hope. I think a project as complex as Hurd needs
to use a language that is specifically designed for that project, that
can work according to the basic design of the OS not the other way
around. Do you think using C fits that criteria for Hurd ?

I have this question on my mind from last 5 years, so today without
any fear of flames and of jokes I, with much courage, have posted
this. What is your view on my reasoning ?




-- 
http://uttre.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/the-lost-love-of-mine/