English

How ISO C became unusable for operating systems development

Operating Systems 2022-01-21 v1 Programming Languages

Abstract

The C programming language was developed in the 1970s as a fairly unconventional systems and operating systems development tool, but has, through the course of the ISO Standards process, added many attributes of more conventional programming languages and become less suitable for operating systems development. Operating system programming continues to be done in non-ISO dialects of C. The differences provide a glimpse of operating system requirements for programming languages.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2201.07845,
  title  = {How ISO C became unusable for operating systems development},
  author = {Victor Yodaiken},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.07845},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

PLOS '21: Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems October 2021

R2 v1 2026-06-24T08:55:46.310Z