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

windows linux macos programming-languages operating-system
Brock Woolf picture Brock Woolf · Feb 24, 2009 · Viewed 387.6k times · Source

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?

Answer

Ana Betts picture Ana Betts · Feb 24, 2009
  • 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.

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