3 ms·

from comments from people who worked on it (e.g., https://twitter.com/MCSpaceCadet/status/968666523425386497 https://twitter.com/MCSpaceCadet/status/9686665234

from comments from people who worked on it (e.g., https://twitter.com/MCSpaceCadet/status/968666523425386497 https://twitter.com/MCSpaceCadet/status/968666523425386497 https://twitter.com/slava_oks/status/958908471801294850 https://twitter.com/slava_oks/status/958908471801294850 ), Microsoft seems to have reached this stage with their Midori project. This was a ground up OS project based on the usual suspects from the research world i.e. object-capability security, microkernel architecture, a new lightweight process model, memory-safe systems language, zero-copy IO etc.; the project lasted 9 years and occupied over 100 senior engineers at its peak. They tried various strategies to run it on top of Windows, run it on top of Linux, run Windows on top of it, run it on Hyper-V, etc etc. before eventually giving up.

lambda 9y ago
Google has the advantage of having two consumer platform (Android and ChromeOS) running on Linux, but with the majority of application code written on top of additional abstractions on top of Linux so a lot of it would still run if the appropriate runtimes were ported over to Fuchsia. Google is also developing Fuchsia openly, if quietly, giving developers a preview of where they are going. Microsoft developed Midori mostly in secret, and while we've heard a little bit about what they did in that project from blog posts and Twitter threads, nothing official has ever been released publicly. And on the server side, virtualization and containerization are huge and growing, as many people find the benefits in flexibility, repeatability of deployment, and incremental billing to outweigh the absolute overhead over bare-metal performance. Fuchsia seems to support virtualization as a core part of the API, allowing you to run Linux VMs when you need to, and it could be possible to port containerized applications piecemeal to Fuchsia with some components still running on Linux on co-located or even the same hardware. I feel like this is one of the benefits of the relatively simpler POSIX style API design, and extensive use of sockets for IPC, over the fairly complex, heaviweight Win32 API and NT kernel. I feel like a lot more software that runs on Linux (and is generally portable to several other POSIX-ish OS's) would be a lot easier to port to Fuchsia, and in an incremental way, than all of the software that runs on Windows systems would be to port to Midori.
pjmlp 9y ago
They did not gave up, management pulled the cord on the team. Joe mentioned at his Rustconf talk how hard it was to convince the Windows team, even with the system running in front of them. When people are religiously against something, no amount of technical achievements is going to change their mind.
- Roritharr 9y ago
  That is incredibly disheartening to hear. I wonder if Satya knows about this point of view.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    It was on the closing Keynote RustConf 2017 - Closing Keynote: Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing by Joe Duffy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVm938gMWl0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVm938gMWl0 You can get more glimpses of how things went when reading between the lines on his Midori postmortem, InfoQ content or occasional twitter comments.
kartickv 9y ago
Shouldn't they have launched it as an alternative to Windows, for those users who want the benefits (reliability, security, whatever) rather than abandoning it? Make it free ($0) and open-source to encourage adoption. And why couldn't it run Windows in a VM for backward compatibility?
- contextfree 9y ago
  I personally agree, but the counterpoint is that this would have taken Microsoft's already confusing and uncertain product and platform roadmap and make it even much worse. I think those worries were absolutely founded even though I think it would've been worth it anyway.
  - kartickv 8y ago
    That's a valid concern, but one caused by selling too many editions of the same product ( https://medium.com/@karti/office-365-was-too-hard-to-buy-so-i-bought-gsuite-e599d2af9962 https://medium.com/@karti/office-365-was-too-hard-to-buy-so-... ) with artifical differentation, not completely different products with different intrinsic tradeoffs.

lambda 9y ago

Google has the advantage of having two consumer platform (Android and ChromeOS) running on Linux, but with the majority of application code written on top of additional abstractions on top of Linux so a lot of it would still run if the appropriate runtimes were ported over to Fuchsia. Google is also developing Fuchsia openly, if quietly, giving developers a preview of where they are going. Microsoft developed Midori mostly in secret, and while we've heard a little bit about what they did in that project from blog posts and Twitter threads, nothing official has ever been released publicly. And on the server side, virtualization and containerization are huge and growing, as many people find the benefits in flexibility, repeatability of deployment, and incremental billing to outweigh the absolute overhead over bare-metal performance. Fuchsia seems to support virtualization as a core part of the API, allowing you to run Linux VMs when you need to, and it could be possible to port containerized applications piecemeal to Fuchsia with some components still running on Linux on co-located or even the same hardware. I feel like this is one of the benefits of the relatively simpler POSIX style API design, and extensive use of sockets for IPC, over the fairly complex, heaviweight Win32 API and NT kernel. I feel like a lot more software that runs on Linux (and is generally portable to several other POSIX-ish OS's) would be a lot easier to port to Fuchsia, and in an incremental way, than all of the software that runs on Windows systems would be to port to Midori.

pjmlp 9y ago

They did not gave up, management pulled the cord on the team. Joe mentioned at his Rustconf talk how hard it was to convince the Windows team, even with the system running in front of them. When people are religiously against something, no amount of technical achievements is going to change their mind.

Roritharr 9y ago
That is incredibly disheartening to hear. I wonder if Satya knows about this point of view.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  It was on the closing Keynote RustConf 2017 - Closing Keynote: Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing by Joe Duffy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVm938gMWl0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVm938gMWl0 You can get more glimpses of how things went when reading between the lines on his Midori postmortem, InfoQ content or occasional twitter comments.

kartickv 9y ago

Shouldn't they have launched it as an alternative to Windows, for those users who want the benefits (reliability, security, whatever) rather than abandoning it? Make it free ($0) and open-source to encourage adoption. And why couldn't it run Windows in a VM for backward compatibility?

contextfree 9y ago
I personally agree, but the counterpoint is that this would have taken Microsoft's already confusing and uncertain product and platform roadmap and make it even much worse. I think those worries were absolutely founded even though I think it would've been worth it anyway.
- kartickv 8y ago
  That's a valid concern, but one caused by selling too many editions of the same product ( https://medium.com/@karti/office-365-was-too-hard-to-buy-so-i-bought-gsuite-e599d2af9962 https://medium.com/@karti/office-365-was-too-hard-to-buy-so-... ) with artifical differentation, not completely different products with different intrinsic tradeoffs.