Re:Writing a Linux-compatible kernel in Rust
by laumars on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @01:37PM
(#29003453)
OS/2 and NT weren’t really seen on home systems.
I’m sure Pascal was much more widespread than your post suggests though. I’m sure I read somewhere that early Windows (as well as Lisa) was written in Pascal. And I do remember Pascal compilers for the Atari ST too. I’d be amazed if there wasn’t one for the Amiga.
But even just going back to DOS, Turbo Pascal was a real game changer for me.
Turbo Pascal, and compilers for Basic dialects were everywhere.
On Amiga, most stuff was being done in Assembly, Modula-2, AMOS, and yes if you bought the Commodore SDK, there was a C compiler.
Mac OS was written in Object Pascal, and eventually moved into C++ with MPW and Symantec PowerPlant around 1992.
On OS/2 we had Smalltalk and C++ with CSet++, on Windows Delphi (TPW still managed an appearance on Windows 3.1), VB, C++ with OWL, VCL, MFC.
Even if the kernel for Windows and OS/2 was written in C, the upper layer was all about C++ with those SDKs, which meant using proper strings, vectors and collection classes with bounds checking was already quite an improvement anyway.
C and UNIX only took new wind into their sails thanks to the GNU Manifesto that all FOSS software should be written in C.