Midori : NT/Vista :: NT : Win95

Looks like Microsoft is preparing for their next great leap forward in OS design. Just as Windows NT’s kernel is a clean room without any DOS baggage, Midori is based on the Singularity research kernel, that is written in .NET and utilizes a new compiler backend to output native code.

This will be rather interesting to watch. The idea of writing an OS kernel in a strongly-typed language makes sense — witness House and Singularity. The effort is not expected to be ready for years — this is not Windows 7, and I’d guess there will still be a traditional Windows 8, even if Midori is ready by then.

Incidentally, the OSS community already has a strongly-typed virtual machine designed for efficient native code generation: LLVM. If one takes a Unix kernel (or, more practically, microkernel) and get it to compile using LLVM’s C front-end, one then has the opportunity to gradually rewrite it one module at a time in any language with LLVM front-ends. In the time it will take for Midori to get ready, would there perhaps be an ML-like front-end to LLVM?

clipped from arstechnica.com Every once in a while, an article gets posted somewhere in the blogosphere about how Microsoft needs to release a complete Windows rewrite, something along the lines of what Apple did with Mac OS X. Most people realize that Microsoft is in no position to pull a stunt like that at the moment; it’s hard to see Microsoft phasing out support for a billion-Windows-PC-strong user base, but that day may one day come, perhaps thanks to robust virtualization technology. But in the meantime, Microsoft has settled on rewriting bits and parts of the Windows operating system as it sees fit, with Vista being one of the biggest rewrites (a fact which partially explains the many hardware and software compatibility issues XP’s successor experienced at launch). Speculation around a non-Windows operating system in the works at Microsoft has been present for years, but recent trustworthy tidbits of information have found their way into the hands of Microsoft ZDNet bloggers Mary Jo Foley and Ed Bott.