If you could write an OS from scratch...

Okay, so most every OS out there is C-based.  If you could magically write a complete hardware-controlling OS all the way up to the UI and applications using a different language, which would you choose?

Though I like Lisp, I think I'd have to choose Erlang, maybe NewSqueak for embedded/smaller systems.

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It's flat out wrong to imply that garbage collectors "leak memory in the short term", just because the collector hasn't been called on the unreachable memory yet. It's the equivalent of saying that my C program leaks memory because I didn't free some malloced memory at the first available opportunity.