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

[John Levine via TUHS]

It appears that Greg A. Woods via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> said:
>I think it would be possible to write a Multics-like system for the
>Intel 80386, (i.e. IA-32) though such a system would have some
>constraints due to the limitations of the 386.  I feel sad that the
>support for segmentation was dropped from the amd64 architecture.

You're probably right but the performance would have been terrible
because loading segment registers on the 386 was very slow, and
there was a single page mapped linear address space into which
all of the active segments had to fit, which meant that the
practical size limit on a segment was a lot less than 32 bits.

R's,
John