The problem is there is a research bottleneck with inadequate development of existing ideas, and relatedly a coordination problem where there aren't enough "ric

The problem is there is a research bottleneck with inadequate development of existing ideas, and relatedly a coordination problem where there aren't enough "rich artists" who want to get rid of accidentally complexity simply because it is the beautiful and correct thing to do. Stuff like Linux us funded by marginalist types who too often just chase after the current paper cut, and miss the forest for the trees. At this point, we can't switch hole hog to a new OS very well. But as I argued in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29697474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29697474 I think we should dump a bunch of funding getting CloudABI or something like it (WASI with WASM, don't care what it's called) over the finish line in multiple OSes. I argue this is a very "non-reformist reform" - Easy to incrementally adopt e.g. for socket-activated services - Nonetheless narrows gap between Unix and cool stuff like Fuschia/seL4 and WASM's future plans - Narrower syscall API that isn't just legacy lowest common denominator will allow multiple implementations of the same interface, which in turn will "unstuck" the whole R&D life cycle: -- Narrow interface means research experiments can better run real programs -- Research experiemnts can show better promise, especially to "practitioners" -- Developing research projects into production systems is cheaper less of a jump This will restore the much needed "fluidity" where there is a continuum between research protypes and production systems, and multiple competing production systems. ---- The good news is that "library OS" type designs are finally kinda going mainstream on the research end of things. Going back to "competition" bucking the current winner take all trend (LLVM > GCC, Linux > other unix) will be prohibitively expensive unless we start reusing code.