I'm not so familiar with the current Linux kernel development, but my understanding is that there are already a lot of development only features that can be activated to catch bugs.
I can see how a full on garbage collector could be useful for development, if it was specifically designed to catch unsafe memory accesses and log them, rather than being designed to be efficient to run.
I've looked over Fil-C doc, and did not find reports of performance, apart from handwavy "faster than the worst case malloc allocation". I expect that, as always, performance would be the main sticking point for an OS that's used all the way from microcontrollers to supercomputers
I can already hear the screams of Linus when someone proposed adding a runtime with garbage collection to the kernel
Well, it can be a fork or a compile-time option
I'm not so familiar with the current Linux kernel development, but my understanding is that there are already a lot of development only features that can be activated to catch bugs.
I can see how a full on garbage collector could be useful for development, if it was specifically designed to catch unsafe memory accesses and log them, rather than being designed to be efficient to run.
I've looked over Fil-C doc, and did not find reports of performance, apart from handwavy "faster than the worst case malloc allocation". I expect that, as always, performance would be the main sticking point for an OS that's used all the way from microcontrollers to supercomputers