The Microsoft Singularity

jose parinas writes ""Microsoft Research has published the first details of a wholly new operating system under development called Singularity, designed new from the ground up, built on a new language and designed with emphasis on dependability instead of performance.""

Comments

pseudo-academics should be careful what they bash

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you actually read any of the papers?

I am an OS academic, and we take Microsoft Research seriously, because they're fucking good.

HotOS is a pretty serious workshop for Operating Systems research. Microsoft Research, among others, pays for the conference room. Singularity isn't far enough long yet to get into a bigger conference like SOSP or OSDI, but you can be sure it will in a year or two.

I wouldn't call Singularity pseudo-academic.

Built on a new language?

[PCM2]

As far as I can see, the language in question is not exactly "new" anymore, being C#. In other words, this is sort of a demo OS written in a managed-code environment as a way to test various OS principles (which in this case sound a lot like the virtualization stuff that so many other vendors are also doing). Singularity seems like the equivalent of writing an operating system in Java for a school project.

Re:another longhorn?

[Jerry Coffin]

Come to think of it - has MS EVER written their own OS from scratch?

Better question: when's the last time anybody wrote an OS from scratch?

As far as I can see, the answer to that is really "never". Before there were OSes, there were collections of macros to act like device drivers and such. The first OSes were based on those, and added slightly more uniform interfaces and such.

Pretty much everything since can be traced back to something previous.

DOS - Borrowed from Tim Patterson's QDOS.

Windows - Shell extention to DOS

Xenix - AT&T/Berkley clone

OS/2 - Co-built with IBM

NT / XP / Vista - Built off of OS/2

DOS 1.0 was based on QDOS, but DOS 2.0 was essentially a complete rewrite that was really based much more closely on UNIX than on QDOS.

In fairness it should also be added that QDOS was based on (according to some, just a re-compile of) CP/M. Lest any CP/Mers get all holier-than-thou about it, in his original announcement letter about it to "Doctor Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia", Gary Kildall openly stated that CP/M was derived from DEC RT/11. I'll assume there aren't enough DECies left to bother debunking the notion that RT/11 was entirely original.

I'd say the others are much the same way: on one hand, MS contributed more originality than you imply, and on the other hand, others contributed less than you imply.

--
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.

Re:another longhorn?

[shmlco]

You mean the way the FOSS community has managed to reinvent Unix from 30 to 40 years earlier? Yay for progress!

Seriously, ALL operating systems borrow concepts from earlier versions and the existing state of the art. Trying to determine the degree (or not) of "innovation" is akin to arguing about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, with no prior agreement as to the size of an angel...

Re:Papers?

[GileadGreene]

Please keep in mind that MS Research is quite a different beast than the production departments of MS. MS Research does a lot of respected work. They also employ some of the most reputable researchers in software and OS development, including:

• Tony Hoare (quicksort, CSP, Hoare logic, among other things)
• Leslie Lamport (TLA+, the bakery algorithm, the byzantine generals problem, LaTeX, among other things)
• Simon Peyton-Jones (Haskell, many things FP)
• Luca Cardelli (many things in type theory and PL semantics)
• Eric Meijer (many things FP)

I dislike MS production software and business practices as much as the next guy. But don't make the mistake of underestimating MS Research just because you dislike MS.

Heres one:

[0kComputer]

How about IXMLHTTPRequest, or what everyone now so fondly calls AJAX now that its all the rave.