Yeah, and we're slowly slowly moving towards that model. One barrier is that some safe languages, like Rust, support far fewer target platforms than the Linux kernel does. There are C compilers for everything, but only a few Rust backends.

Something similar to Wuffs[0] (posted on HN very recently), which compiles down to C, might be a good compromise between portability and safe languages. (There may be some contorted way to have Rust emit C, too.)

[0]: https://github.com/google/wuffs

Rust uses LLVM, which likely should have easier time being ported than an entire Rust compiler. Rust handles cross-compilation pretty well so you don't have to compile on an actual embedded device, or something.

I wonder if an LLVM backend that issues a very simple and predictable subset of C would be a viable way to support exotic old architectures which only have a C compiler. LLVM-cbe is a thing: https://github.com/JuliaComputing/llvm-cbe

Definitely, for example check how to make Go .so libraries.

https://medium.com/swlh/build-and-use-go-packages-as-c-libra...

Naturally the runtime also comes along, but that is another matter.