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Microsoft certainly have the resources, and some interest as proven by their Singularity experiment. Obviously they haven't found it commercially viable as of y

Microsoft certainly have the resources, and some interest as proven by their Singularity experiment. Obviously they haven't found it commercially viable as of yet, we'll see what the rumored Midori can bring. But if Microsoft with all their resources can't make it performant enough to be of interest outside of academia (where Singularity ended up) then I doubt anyone can. The thing is of course that native non-garbage collected operating systems aren't crash-prone, if they were then we would have seen a shift in systems language out of pure necessity ages ago. As it stands, bugs are found, bugs get fixed, systems end up stable and very performant.

pjmlp 14y ago
Actually Microsoft is already heading slowly in that direction in Windows. C is official legacy and its compiler won't be improved past C90. C++ got the C++/CX extensions, which kind of make it language with integrated reference counting, if you only care about Windows. Assuming Windows 9 or whatever it will be called will have broader WinRT support and better commercial luck than Windows 8. .NET applications are compiled to native code in Windows Phone 8, by making use of techniques developed during the Singularity project. So they got something out of it already, even if it is not at kernel level. However it is a case of "Worse is Better" and I personally think it will take a few generations for young developers to replace the old mentality. Or I am just plain wrong.