I think this misses the whole point. If you want novel computer systems you can't build them on top of the old ones. That's the whole point of Pike. An OS is

I think this misses the whole point. If you want novel computer systems you can't build them on top of the old ones. That's the whole point of Pike. An OS is the thing in about Linux (kernel) scope. The whole point is that this is something that is by no mean "done". If you want innovation in this space you need to build exactly such a thing from scratch! But the OS is only one part of systems design. Doing something novel in this area would be to continue where we stopped around 1970. There was no progress since than. Only one computer architecture with only one OS left. Since than nothing truly innovative was even tried. (OK, to be fair, almost nothing. There been things like Intel's iAPX 432, or Microsoft's Midori, or things like the Connection Machine. But mainstream is still on the std. tech form the 70'. Even mainframes are actually technological more advanced, as they had for example multiprocessing, VMs and containers already decades ago). I for my part think that if we would rethink computers form the ground up in light of today's possibilities they would be very very different. Alone the security hell today is only there because we still want to run "normal C programs". Everybody knows that this is not fixable without throwing away some of the old concepts. Still nobody wants to move. (Almost perfectly secure computers would be possible. You "just" need to build capability security into CPUs, the OS, and all apps…). Or another example: Scaling to many many cores would be much easier if computers would be fully data-flow aware. But currently we like to pretend that our CPUs are still PDP-7s. They need to offer the exact same interface (conceptually) or else this would not match the C abstract machine any more 1:1… But the CPU than needs to use a built in "hardware JIT" to translate the sequential command streams it receives to its internal data-flow operations. Somethings that's extremely inefficient and overly complicated—besides that it conceptually can't even help much. There is only so much parallelism extractable form an inherently sequential description of computation… (The most crazy part about this is that we have plenty information available on the high level which we happy erase during compilation, so we can present a "nice flat command stream" to the CPU. That's imho pure insanity). But nobody dares to rethink such systems as a whole: which means form the languages and their abstract machines, through the concrete hardware, the OS level, up to application design. Things like the von Neumann bottleneck were discussed already almost 50 years ago. The issue remains open to this day. Just put another layer of caches on top. Nobody cares about efficiency anyway… Because rewriting software would be to expensive. So the hardware can't be improved. So software needs to optimize for the old hardware concepts. Which leads to the dead-lock in which we're currently, where no substantial improvement can be made any more. We're in this trap since 50 years. And that's why systems research is absolutely dead by now. My 2ct. Sorry for the long post. But I have strong feelings about that topic.