Linked by J. Scott Edwards on Fri 17th Dec 2004 18:51 UTC
Every hard-core OS aficionado has done it: Laid out a grand scheme for creating the perfect OS. Taking all the best features and attributes from the OSes we love, and making sure to assiduously avoid the pitfalls of the OSes we don't. Maybe our goals were modest, and we just wanted a slightly tweaked version of an existing OS. But sometimes we're feeling ambitious, and we have large, creative ideas for revolutionizing computing. Long-time OSNews reader and contributor J. Scott Edwards just couldn't help himself, and he has set about to not only plan, but to try to build his dream OS.
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A lot of what you have written about here is also written about very interestingly in the various different books about the IBM/Apple "Taligent" project of the late 80s/early 90s.
One of the main problems this project exposed (apart from management issues, and market readiness) was that an object/RPC approach is too often bound tightly to the implementation languages of choice, and is intrinsically difficult to 'scale-out' across the network, which is where much of today's computing takes place (albeit with some fairly clunky interfaces between your web browser and your word processor, for instance!)
I'm not really sure that what we need is a "new operating system" at all. There are a variety of kernels available which make various different trade-offs (some necessary, some unnecessary); there are a variety of choices in terms of messaging or RPC protocols, and language bindings; there is a whole *heap* of research needed around interoperable information transform and persistence models (we were *nearly* there with a workable solution with WinFS, but still not quite - particularly in the distributed case)
There's work in both the MacOS and Windows worlds on better visualization stacks (from hardware up to presentation layer), and I'd *love* to see some more innovative work coming out of the Linux/OpenSource folks there; the forks and branches of X just don't really cut it for the next generation, there needs to be a more fundamental, but interoperable rethink there.
Then there's the applets and tools that are now considered "part" of the operating system, and the way that they can leverage this plumbing to deliver user value. And that's the key. User value. What problems are you trying to solve? How does this technology help solve them?
Starting from scratch is really not going to get off the ground. You end up having to make all sorts of compromises just to get bootstrapped, and you would be better starting from an existing platform.