On Thu, Mar 05, 2009 at 07:22:28AM +0100, yoann padioleau wrote:
> Qemu is written in C, because I guess indeed C struct and union
> and bitfields makes it easy to match directly to the hardware (no marshalling,
> there is direct mapping).

I was hacking on qemu last week, and wishing it wasn't written in C.

There's not much of a technical reason why it couldn't have been
written in a higher level language.  Bitfield manipulation would be
more painful unless there was a bitstring-like preprocessor added.

The real reason to use C was to get wider development support.  Qemu
also happens to be security critical (all those hacked up C device
emulations offer exploit possibilities for the guests).  And it has
frequent vulnerabilities.  Go figure ...

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat