Are you trying to illustrate your words by acting as if you were yourself really "superior" ?

I heard about hurd long time ago and it was already a long time project. I heard it will soon be released so many time that I can't count them. I even actually spoke with people working on it (about ten years ago) that were assuring me that the project was on the run for a stable release.

Ten years later, I'm acting as supervisor for student writing their own kernels every year: in 4 years of activities I have seen about 7 kernel projects reaching an "interesting state", and those kernel were all "experimental" in their own way: micro-kernel, coded in some specific language (D, OCaml ... ), fully modularized, coded for exotic architectures ... All are single-man project done by students.

Booting and reaching the state were drivers and userland are the next checkpoint is not so hard, even when you deal with "new inner architecture". But keeping a project really active so that you reach a stable state, is much harder, and it seems that hurd fails on that matter.

Hurd might have been "new" twenty years ago, but for now, it is just another not-working micro-kernel.

(oh, mind your respect, should I talk about GNUstep ?)

Each time somone talk about moving from C to some others languages, we heard about C++, C# or Java. All are kind of OOL, but whatabout typed functionnal programming languages ?

I'm using OCaml every day, for many things (in the CDuce interpreter, see www.CDuce.org, but also in other coding projects.) And it is fast (nearly as C, just take a look at this language benchmark), it is in some way safe (the famous : "Well typed programs cannot go wrong"), it has a good interaction mechanism with C librairies, programs can be compiled in native or in bytecode, OCaml native code compiler is giving very good result on many arch/OS ...

And, speaking about gnome, there's also a "wrapper" for GTK and GTK2 (called lablgtk and lablgtk2.)