What languages are Windows Mac OS X and Linux written in

Question

I was just wondering who knows what programming languages Windows  Mac OS X and Linux are made up from and what languages are used for each part of the OS  ie  Kernel  plug-in architecture  GUI components  etc    I assume that there are multiple languages for each and obviously I know the Linux kernel is written in C   I m totally guessing here that Mac OS X contains a lot of Objective-C code as it is Apple s language derived from NeXT   Windows  I have heard contains C  C   and Intel Assembly  Do Linux or Mac OS contain any Assembly code   Also  are there scripting languages like Ruby  Python  etc used by the OS developers for scripting parts of the OS  What parts of the OS would be written in each language

User · Answer

See under the heading One Operating System Running On Multiple Platforms where it states    Most of the source code for Windows NT is written in C or C

User · Answer

You re right MacOSX has Objective-C in the core    Windows C    Linux C  About the scripting languages  no  they pretty much high level

User · Answer

Windows c c   10  C  Perl Linux C MAC Obective c Android Java c   Solaris c c   I hope you get the answer

User · Answer

windows  C   linux  C mac  Objective C android  JAVA  C  C   Solaris  C  C   iOS 7  Objective-C Swift C  C

User · Answer

Windows  C    kernel is in C Mac  Objective C  kernel is in C  IO PnP subsystem is Embedded C    Linux  Most things are in C  many userland apps are in Python  KDE is all C     All kernels will use some assembly code as well

User · Answer

Windows  Mostly C and C    some C

User · Answer

I understand that this is an old post but Windows is definitely not written in C    There is lots of C   in it but what we technical define as an operating system is not in C    The Windows API  the Windows kernel  both of these are in essence what an operating system is  are written in C  Years ago I was given some leaked code for both Windows 2000 and Windows XP  The code was not nearly complete enough to compile the kernel or API but we were able to compile individual programs and services  For example  we were able to successfully compile Notepad exe  mspaint exe  and the spoolsv exe service  print spooler   All written in C  I have not looked again but I am sure that leaked code still survives as torrent files out there that may still be available

User · Answer

I have read or heard that Mac OS X is written mostly in Objective-C with some of the lower level parts  such as the kernel  and hardware device drivers written in C  I believe that Apple  eat s  its own dog food   meaning that they write Mac OS X using their own Xcode Developer Tools  The GCC GNU Compiler Collection  compiler-linker is the unix command line tool that xCode used for most of its compiling  and or linking of executables  Among other possible languages  I know GCC compiles source code from the C  Objective-C  C   and Objective-C   languages

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Wow    9 years of question but I ve just come across a series of internal article on Windows Command Line history and I think some part of it might be relevant Windows side of the question       For those who care about such things  Many have asked whether Windows is written in C or C    The answer is that - despite NT s Object-Based design - like most OS   Windows is almost entirely written in  C   Why  C   introduces a cost in terms of memory footprint  and code execution overhead  Even today  the hidden costs of code written in C   can be surprising  but back in the late 1990 s  when memory cost   60 MB  yes      60 per MEGABYTE    the hidden memory cost of vtables etc  was significant  In addition  the cost of virtual-method call indirection and object-dereferencing could result in very significant performance  amp  scale penalties for C   code at that time  While one still needs to be careful  the performance overhead of modern C   on modern computers is much less of a concern  and is often an acceptable trade-off considering its security  readability  and maintainability benefits     which is why we re steadily upgrading the Console   s code to modern C

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The Linux kernel is mostly written in C  and a bit of assembly language  I d imagine   but some of the important userspace utilities  programs  are shell scripts written in the Bash scripting language  Beyond that  it s sort of hard to define  Linux  since you basically build a Linux system by picking bits and pieces you want and putting them together  and depending on what an individual Linux user wants  you can get pretty much any language involved   As Paul said  Python and C   play important roles

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Linux  C  Some parts in assembly         It s mostly in C  but most people wouldn t call what I write C  It uses every conceivable feature of the 386 I could find  as it was also a project to teach me about the 386  As already mentioned  it uses a MMU  for both paging  not to disk yet  and segmentation  It s the segmentation that makes it REALLY 386 dependent  every task has a 64Mb segment for code  amp  data - max 64 tasks in 4Gb  Anybody who needs more than 64Mb task - tough cookies         Some of my  quot C quot -files  specifically mm c  are almost as much assembler as C        Unlike minix  I also happen to LIKE interrupts  so interrupts are handled without trying to hide the reason behind them   Source   Mac OS X  Cocoa mostly in Objective-C  Kernel written in C  some parts in assembly   Mac OS X  at the kernel layer  is mostly an older  free operating system called BSD  specifically  it   s Darwin  a sort of hybrid of BSD  Mach  and a few other things     almost entirely C  with a bit of assembler thrown in   Source  Much of Cocoa is implemented in Objective-C  an object-oriented language that is compiled to run at incredible speed  yet employes a truly dynamic runtime making it uniquely flexible  Because Objective-C is a superset of C  it is easy to mix C and even C   into your Cocoa applications   Source   Windows  C  C    C   Some parts in assembler   We use almost entirely C  C    and C  for Windows  Some areas of code are hand tuned hand written assembly   Source   Unix  C  Some parts in assembly   Source

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As an addition about the core of Mac OS X  Finder had not been written in Objective-C prior to Snow Leopard  In Snow Leopard it was written in Cocoa  Objective-C

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Windows is obviously not written in C       Simply see the source code of Windows and you ll see

User · Answer

Mac OS X uses large amounts of C   inside some libraries  but it isn t exposed as they re afraid of the ABI breaking

[windows] What languages are Windows, Mac OS X and Linux written in?

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