Two ways to look at it. If I told you that your computer or phone could run the same OS and all the same programs but at 1/10th of the speed so that certain classes of bugs could be eliminated, would you make that switch right here and now? I don’t mean theoretically I mean the device you are looking at right now. If not, would you do that in a year?
On the other hand, Moore’s law and all that. Computers will get faster over time so at some pint we might not care. And the opposite of my question is also true: if you could switch to a faster OS written in assembly, would you (assuming all functionality stays the same), knowing certain classes of bugs are more likely?
It seems to me that the cost of these kinds of bugs is amortized such that it is cheaper to use C than to switch. Expressed in those terms, we will only switch to a different language for all our systems stuff when the cost of the rewrite and the cost of the performance penalty are clearly and significantly less than the cost of the bugs we are likely to expedience.
