I agree, but only up to a point. Of course, it'll help you loads in specific scenarios, but in many more you'll be able to get what you want by simply hacking a

I agree, but only up to a point. Of course, it'll help you loads in specific scenarios, but in many more you'll be able to get what you want by simply hacking around the parts of the operating system that gives you those issues in the first place. As one example, I remember one person describing to me how some of the banks had set their computers to give their user mode programs the ability to perform I/O directly by adding the appropriate memory locations of the network ports to their virtual memory. It destroys the protection, but massively improves performance. Most modern operating systems can in general be tuned or hacked to essentially get out of your way whenever you don't need them. You'd have to have a very specific use case to justify the creation of a whole operating system specifically to run your language - and an amazing business case. Importantly, in the actual real life use cases they're not talking about providing an operating system for actual hardware that has better performance (there'd be so much expense on application support) - they're talking about providing an operating system that targets a VM model. This is a major thing - it shows (to me at least) that they're using the OS model for the purposes of additional security as opposed to anything else (especially since it's Galois who have done lots of it).