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If so, please list some of them. Thanks

DWalters
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    If you have any reasons why this is a valid programming question, please list them. – H H Sep 29 '10 at 23:52
  • @Martin: That's funny. Alas, GNU Emacs is implemented in c. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Sep 30 '10 at 00:34
  • This really should be community wiki. – You Sep 30 '10 at 00:36
  • I honestly do not understand why my question is classified as vague. How hard is it to understand? Are there any operating systems that do not have any source code in ASM, C, or C++? There is nothing vague about this question. Nothing at all. Not every question ought to have a straightforward answer. That fact does not invalidate the question. Thanks a lot to those who contributed – DWalters Sep 30 '10 at 02:46
  • @DWalt, you are right, it should have been closed "Off Topic". – H H Sep 30 '10 at 11:44
  • And: "Not every question ought to have a straightforward answer" - on this site it does. Read the Faq and pick another forum. – H H Sep 30 '10 at 11:45
  • If you delete the source code after you finish writing the OS, then it only has machine code. And the machine language was written by the architects of the computer you are using. – Sam Reeve Feb 20 '16 at 22:22

7 Answers7

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The operating system on the Symbolics LISP machine was written in LISP. Now you can claim that this was programming in ASM as the machine code on these machines was a limited form of LISP, but it certainly had zero C or C++ code!

Chris Dodd
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The Xerox Star back in 1977 had an operating system called "Pilot", written entirely in Xerox PARCs in-house language Mesa. Additionally, the CAP Computer had an OS written in ALGOL, and the Oberon OS was written the programming language with the same name.

Community
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You
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I don't know of any, and you're highly unlikely to find one any time soon. It also depends on what you call an operating system. A lot of people include high-level tools (commonly written in C) such as compilers as part of an operating system, and many of these tools are written in C. Also, most "higher-level" programming languages require use of a compiler/interpreter, which is typically written in C.

You could though, if you wanted to. A bit of hand-written machine code to replace the initialization assembly code, but I really don't know why you'd want to do that!

André Caron
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    us old guys worked on operating systems built before c/c++ even existed. When not using assembler many used PL/1 like languages, prime used fortran – pm100 Sep 30 '10 at 01:11
  • I'm fully aware of that, but I think the question implicitly treated of *current* operating systems. – André Caron Sep 30 '10 at 01:42
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    I honestly do not understand why my question is classified as vague. How hard is it to understand? Are there any operating systems that do not have any source code in ASM, C, or C++? There is nothing vague about this question. Nothing at all. Not every question ought to have a straightforward answer. That fact does not invalidate the question. Thanks a lot to those who contributed. – DWalters Sep 30 '10 at 02:36
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I agree with all the posters who have offered an answer (except for the guy who suggested this wasn't a valid question - looks very valid to me).

The answer I would like to propose is that, while theoretically possible, it would be extremely cumbersome to a human being and 100% impractical. However, in the near future, machines could write their own OS directly in their machine language with little or no human interaction. This code would have zero lines of code in Assembly, C and C++.

Mark
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  • Really, computers already do "write" their own code. Tools that compile asm, C or C++ take human input and generate machine code from it. – Sam Reeve Feb 20 '16 at 22:17
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JavaOS was written mostly in Java. But of course it is built atop a virtual machine which in turn is probably implemented using C/C++/Asm.

On the other hand, every programming environment will somehow rely on libraries which are eventually coded in Assembler...

MartinStettner
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Zero C or C++ is theoretically possible. But as far as I know all Operating Systems are written in a mix of C and ASM.

However, I don't think you can get away with an OS without assembly code since there are some very low level init instructions in all current platforms that you will definitely need to write in assembly code I guess...

Pablo Santa Cruz
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You could bit-bang a bootloader with a text editor, but there are very few people who would actually waste their time doing this today when tools like ASM and C/C++ exist.

Chris K
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