Why not have a High Level Language based OS? Are Low Level Languages more efficient?

Posted by rtindru on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by rtindru
Published on 2013-06-28T07:46:38Z Indexed on 2013/06/28 10:28 UTC
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Without being presumptuous, I would like you to consider the possibility of this. Most OS today are based on pretty low level languages (mainly C/C++) Even the new ones such as Android uses JNI & underlying implementation is in C

In fact, (this is a personal observation) many programs written in C run a lot faster than their high level counterparts (eg: Transmission (a bittorrent client on Ubuntu) is a whole lot faster than Vuze(Java) or Deluge(Python)). Even python compilers are written in C, although PyPy is an exception.

So is there a particular reason for this? Why is it that all our so called "High Level Languages" with the great "OOP" concepts can't be used in making a solid OS?

So I have 2 questions basically.

  1. Why are applications written in low level languages more efficient than their HLL counterparts? Do low level languages perform better for the simple reason that they are low level and are translated to machine code easier?
  2. Why do we not have a full fledged OS based entirely on a High Level Language?

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