Kernel programming is an eternal struggle between people trying to pull more into the kernel for performance, and people trying to pull stuff back out for safety and modularity. We've all seen the arguments about the in-kernel HTTP daemons and whatnot. I tend to be on the side that says that more things should be pulled out.
> This is partly driven by "we need device drivers and no one understands C anymore"
I don't buy this argument. Who are the people
* Using NetBSD
* having cutting-edge hardware for which drivers don't exist
* deciding to write device drivers
* that have device specs/docs needed to write them
* that don't know/want to use C
* that would do it if only they could write it in a scripting language?
Do these people exist? I assert that the far more common case is that the device specs, documentation, BIOS, etc. aren't accessible. If that's true, they couldn't write the driver regardless of the language, C is hardly the limiting factor here
> This is partly driven by "we need device drivers and no one understands C anymore"
I don't buy this argument. Who are the people
* Using NetBSD
* having cutting-edge hardware for which drivers don't exist
* deciding to write device drivers
* that have device specs/docs needed to write them
* that don't know/want to use C
* that would do it if only they could write it in a scripting language?
Do these people exist? I assert that the far more common case is that the device specs, documentation, BIOS, etc. aren't accessible. If that's true, they couldn't write the driver regardless of the language, C is hardly the limiting factor here