I recently read an article online at Software Development Times. It was about a new operating system from Microsoft called Midori. The unusual thing about this operating system is that it is not a new version of Windows. It is instead based upon another research operating system from Microsoft called Singularity. Midori is meant to coexist with old Windows applications. However it does get rid of dynamic link libraries. It also builds Service Oriented Architecture into the runtime. The API is object oriented. Application created for the new operating system will be written in .NET languages. This project falls under the Microsoft Research division.
Since the Midori Operating System is based on Singularity, I thought I would mention a bit about it. Singularity is another operating system from Microsoft Research that was released in 2007. It is a microkernel operating system. It has some unique characteristics. Applications run in one process (address space). The kernel, device drivers, and application are all written in managed code. The goal is for the operating system to be highly dependable. Low level interrupt code is written in a combination of assembly and C programming languages. The hardware abstraction layer (HAL) is written in C++.
The Midori Operating System is being written with the Bartok compiler. The Bartok compiler is yet another project out of Microsoft Research. It is intended for writing efficient code needed to write operating systems. The compiler itself is written in C#. This compiler was also used to write a lot of the Singularity operating system. This operating system allows an application running in it to choose a version of components (such as garbage collection) at run time.
Obviously there are some very interesting projects coming out of Microsoft Research. I wonder if any of these will reach a production status on par with something like Microsoft Visual Studio.
