Can an Operating System be written un C-unlike programming language

[Steven Shaw]

Someone wrote an operating system in Common Lisp - "Movitz", I think.
The EROS guys are using an sexpr based language called BitC for their
latest project. The old Genera/LispMachine operating system was
written in Lisp (and programmable microcode).

I think the answer is that "much can be done". Expect to have a small
amount of assembler code (Linux does).

I imagine that much can be done in Slate. Some part might suit Pidgin better.

The tricky parts might be code in which you do not want to have an
interrupt trap. Some in Linux has this requirement. Code like this
cannot allocate memory. This is one of the big problems - it's hard to
avoid allocation in a high level language - particularly one with
closures. I'm not sure enough about operating system design to know if
you can avoid constraints like this on your code.

Steve.