Jonathan Shapiro, main developer of Coyotos and BitC, has announced on the project's mailing list that he has been hired by Microsoft, and that he won't be able to continue to work on Coyotos and BitC. He promises to deliver a final release of BitC, with all the intended features, but he warns that that may not be possible. At Microsoft, he's going to work on the Midori project.Coyotos is a microkernel operating system with a number of goals, most of which I honestly don't even understand correctly myself. Coyotos is an evolutionary step forward from EROS, and aims to be the first formally verified operating system. To achieve this goal, the BitC programming language was envisioned. "BitC is a new systems programming language. It seeks to combine the flexibility, safety, and richness of Standard ML or Haskell with the low-level expressiveness of C." Shapiro was the driving force behind both projects.
"Some of you will have noticed that I have been conspicuously silent over the last three or four weeks. I have spent much of that time airborne, or in interviews at Google, Microsoft, and DARPA," Shapiro writes, "After a fair bit of soul-searching, I have decided to accept a fairly senior position at Microsoft associated with the Midori project. The current plan has me starting there at the beginning of August."
The Midori project is a project at Microsoft that's in incubation, which is a step beyond Microsoft Research. Midori is believed to be a commercial implementation of Singularity, where everything is written in managed code. It also sports a security model where every application is running in a sandbox. Reports indicated that Microsoft even has a migration path ready from Windows to Midori.
