I really admire the discipline of programmers that work seriously on real-time code... but indeed, at the end of the day, they all depend on the OS and everythi

I really admire the discipline of programmers that work seriously on real-time code... but indeed, at the end of the day, they all depend on the OS and everything else that might be running on it for the code to behave as real-time as expected. Sure, they can set the threads to high priority and all that, but... it's still not as good as one would like. And that's not even for hard real-time. On the other hand, I can't really expect regular OS's to implement a "real-time" mode or something like that. As much as I'd like it, I feel it would be so complex and fundamentally incompatible with the way those OS's work! (and then I also start thinking about power management, external factors affecting hardware, etc). I hope the future proves me wrong. Given how much people works on audio and plays videogames on those OS's, the current situation is kind of sad.