[TUHS] Hypothetical: Could MULTICS have been written in C, if available?

[Bakul Shah via TUHS]

On May 25, 2026, at 6:45 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> I have a son who is more about theory, he's a math guy.  I nudged him 
> towards programming, he of course went to python.  I nudged him towards
> C and he came back with the best statement ever that I have gotten from
> him: In C, you can feel the machine.

That is exactly it!

> It seems like people want to move away from C to stuff like Go and Rust
> and whatever.  They are probably right.  C is not for the casual people,
> if you aren't paying attention C is not for you.  We paid attention and
> it worked for us.

I have been looking at R9 (a reimplementation of plan9 kernel in Rust --
not sure of the current state but not self-hosting as yet). There are
268 unsafe blocks/expressions in 9.6K lines of rust (counted using wc).
Now I am not a fan of Rust but 268 unsafes is not bad at all as it shows
what you need at a minimum to "feel to the machine"! And yet, today the
game has changed; security is of paramount importance to anything that
can be connected to the net.

Attention has to be paid, no matter what PL or tool (such as LLMs)
you use!