This is partially the motivation behind MSR's Drawbridge project (which is the predecessor for Windows Subsystem for Linux), the idea being that the personality

This is partially the motivation behind MSR's Drawbridge project (which is the predecessor for Windows Subsystem for Linux), the idea being that the personality of the OS runs in user space and each application runs in a sandboxed picoprocess. All ~14,000 functions exposed by Windows DLLs could be implemented by a narrow ~45 ABI calls provided by the host. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/drawbridge/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/drawbridge/