Linked by J. Scott Edwards on Fri 17th Dec 2004 18:51 UTC
Every hard-core OS aficionado has done it: Laid out a grand scheme for creating the perfect OS. Taking all the best features and attributes from the OSes we love, and making sure to assiduously avoid the pitfalls of the OSes we don't. Maybe our goals were modest, and we just wanted a slightly tweaked version of an existing OS. But sometimes we're feeling ambitious, and we have large, creative ideas for revolutionizing computing. Long-time OSNews reader and contributor J. Scott Edwards just couldn't help himself, and he has set about to not only plan, but to try to build his dream OS.
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...is off course a good vision. However, a while ago there was an article here or on /. about the rejection of a C++ patch for Linux. It would allow C++ code in the kernel (not force everything to be rewritten). They reason it was rejected was plain simple: performance. Afaik, Torvalds' argument against it, was the lack of good C++ compilers on the platforms Linux runs on. C does not have this problem, according to him afaik. Hence the rejection of a C++ patch, no matter how lovely it may sound.
Same goes for a microkernel, but I guess we've all read that discussion from 1991.
For a good performing microkernel, you might want to look at AmigaOS. I heard it's know for both it's flexibility and performance. It is a microkernel, I read that filesystem support is actually a set of libraries on the system (in userspace that is). Don't know it it's C or C++.
I guess you could always design it for C++ and then write it in C using structs and some other hacks...