alt Hacker News> People just stopped caring about operating systems research and systems programming after ~2005.
and so it was that after that date, all development of
embedded systems
kernel drivers
digital audio workstations
video editors
codecs for audio and video
anything that involved actually controlling non-computer hardware
game engines
Replies
pjmlp • today at 8:38 AM
On Windows, macOS and Android, most of that development on that list is done in C++, not C.
What I mean is all of those things are more of the same things we did since 90s.
It is better and higher performing hardware but until Rust and Zig arrived, the most popular ways of designing system-level software stayed the same. RTOSes work the same as how they work in late 90s / early 00s. C ABI is still the majority of communication interface. Interacting with OS using system calls stayed the same. After virtual memory and paging no big change in OS design happened. Main programming design patterns in C and C++ also stayed the same.
One area that stayed interesting is GPU programming. Nowadays CPUs basically provide us a PDP-11 simulator. Most of the time you don't need to recompile programs to harness most of the gains from a CPU. GPUs expose more of their internal hardware detaila than CPUs and unlike CPUs you need to recompile programs (which is what a GPU userspace driver does) to use newer models.