What's the advantage of writing an OS entirely in assembly?
assembly, c, operating-system
Solution
Interfacing with an OS tends to be easiest in the language it was written in -- C in UNIX and Win32, C++ in BeOS, etc. MenuetOS was designed specifically to make developing assembly applications easy, so the best choice was to write the OS itself in assembly.
For OSes which aren't intended to be general-purpose, such as embedded systems and microcontrollers, the overhead introduced by mechanical translation (ie compilation) of C into assembly can be unacceptable. Compilers aren't as smart as humans, especially when it comes to the sorts of fiddly little optimizations required on embedded platforms, and writing directly in assembly guarantees there won't be a compiler mucking up carefully-designed algorithms.
Problem
MenuetOS is an example of an OS written entirely in Assembly. Is there any advantage to writing it in Assembly instead of a low-level programming language such as C?