I'd like to think these ideas have been around and well-known for decades, and we're starting to see the hardware rise up to support them. If you told someone in 2001 that Linux would be rewritten in say, Java, with a garbage collector it would have been dismissed as starkly inefficient. Nowadays we have hardware that makes certain safeties negligible on performance (memory tagging, bounds checking, etc). Nowadays we can make an OS out of Java and it will stand just fine. Or Rust. Faster hardware means we run slower (and safer) software. Not everything gets isolated into an ASIC, of course.
pjmlp|3 years ago
Midori powered Asian Bing as proof of its capabilities, and yet Windows team was dismissal of its capabilities and instead went on reinventing .NET with COM, aka .NET Native and C++/CX alongside WinRT. A kind of ironic given that it was .NET original design (codename Ext-VOS), before they decided to reboot COM with a managed runtime, alongside the J++ issues that caused COOL to become C# instead.
Quite interesting feedback from Joe Duffy how everything went down,
"Safe Systems Programming in C# and .NET" - https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programmi...
"RustConf 2017 - Closing Keynote: Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVm938gMWl0
> OS and tools for building dependable systems. The Singularity research codebase and design evolved to become the Midori advanced-development OS project. While never reaching commercial release, at one time Midori powered all of Microsoft’s natural language search service for the West Coast and Asia.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity...
Ironically, despite still having the Linux kernel underneath and enough C++, Android and ChromeOS are probably the mainstream OSes that are closer to the overall idea, at least in what concerns userspace applications.
As on the Microsoft side, WinDev seems to always sabotage those ideas, as you can infer from Joe Duffy talks, and from Apple side although Swift is supposed to play a major role going forward, C, C++ and Objective-C still represent the majority of the stack.
Maursault|3 years ago
> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/singularity...
> Ironically, despite still having the Linux kernel underneath and enough C++, Android and ChromeOS are probably the mainstream OSes that are closer to the overall idea, at least in what concerns userspace applications.
Singularity uses a proprietary language-based microkernel. Midori was allegedly an attempt at a commercial version of Singularity, and I'm not sure what is different about the two, but Midori also uses a microkernel. Linux famously uses a monolithic kernel. Also, consider, any operating system that uses the Linux kernel... is Linux by definition, though technically Linux is the kernel, GNU/Linux is the OS.
There is a piece of container management software, I think that's what it is, called Singularity, and it uses the Linux kernel running on Linux. Maybe you were thinking of the wrong Singularity.
kaba0|3 years ago
mcswell|3 years ago