No, it just means so far Apple and Microsoft were not that interested into doing that. I don't count with the commercial UNIX vendors, except Sun, because those only care about C and C++, mainly.
But this is going to change slowly anyway.
Sun did experiment using Java in the Solaris kernel, they just didn't went that far due to what happen to them.
Apple first played with GC in Objective-C, and now you have ARC both in Mac OS X and iOS.
Microsoft played with Singularity, only allowed .NET applications on Windows Phone 7.x and Windows (Phone) 8 uses C++/CX, which uses a reference counting runtime (WinRT). While C is considered legacy for Microsoft (official version).
C++11 has reference counting libraries and a GC API for compiler implementers.
Android has Dalvik and the native applications are actually shared objected loaded into Dalvik. Contrary to what some people think the NDK does not allow for full development of C and C++ code, except for a few restricted system APIs.
Sailfish and Blackberry, Qt makes use of C++ with reference counting and JavaScript.
FirefoxOS and ChromeOS are anyway only browsed based.
If there is natural selection in this, it might just be that manual memory management is going to be restricted to the same set as Assembly. Interacting with hardware or for special cases of code optimization.
So a systems programming language using either GC or reference counting, with the ability of doing manual memory management inside unsafe regions, might eventually be the future.
But this is going to change slowly anyway.
Sun did experiment using Java in the Solaris kernel, they just didn't went that far due to what happen to them.
Apple first played with GC in Objective-C, and now you have ARC both in Mac OS X and iOS.
Microsoft played with Singularity, only allowed .NET applications on Windows Phone 7.x and Windows (Phone) 8 uses C++/CX, which uses a reference counting runtime (WinRT). While C is considered legacy for Microsoft (official version).
C++11 has reference counting libraries and a GC API for compiler implementers.
Android has Dalvik and the native applications are actually shared objected loaded into Dalvik. Contrary to what some people think the NDK does not allow for full development of C and C++ code, except for a few restricted system APIs.
Sailfish and Blackberry, Qt makes use of C++ with reference counting and JavaScript.
FirefoxOS and ChromeOS are anyway only browsed based.
If there is natural selection in this, it might just be that manual memory management is going to be restricted to the same set as Assembly. Interacting with hardware or for special cases of code optimization.
So a systems programming language using either GC or reference counting, with the ability of doing manual memory management inside unsafe regions, might eventually be the future.