> why should the OS be anything other than a hypervisor for managing those, plus some abstractions like a "container" interface that each runtime execution driv

> why should the OS be anything other than a hypervisor for managing those, plus some abstractions like a "container" interface that each runtime execution driver implements? We could have had something like Microsoft Research's SingularityOS a decade ago if we had approached the problem from the other direction—pushing the runtime lower in the stack, instead of trying to write a kernel that does everything. Imagine your laptop booting into Xen, and then loading a Smalltalk image that contains the desktop, while in parallel booting up some background daemons into virtually-isolated Erlang nodes. With Microsoft partnering with Docker, I can see exactly that happening in a few years.