Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Wed 30th Jul 2008 21:26 UTC, submitted by snydeq
Microsoft appears to be assembling its game plan for the day when the Windows client OS as it has been developed for the past 20 years becomes obsolete. The incubation project, also known as Midori, seeks to create a componentized, Net-centric OS, based on connected systems - one that largely eliminates dependencies between local apps and the hardware on which they run. SDTimes is also featuring an article that has some more details about Midori.
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RE: Taking notes from the OSS projects already?
by tomcat on Thu 31st Jul 2008 06:44
in reply to "Taking notes from the OSS projects already?"
Member since:2006-01-06
Funny, as I read about Midori, once you tear away all the marketing fluff, the core ideas are pretty much the same as what we are already working on over in SharpOS
Uh, yeah, of course the "core ideas are pretty much the same", because they're all derivative of Microsoft's Singularity research project.
But in the meantime, there are others that are already working on this, in the OSS realm, who will probably get there a lot sooner than MS.
What is "this" and where is "there"? You don't know what MS is working on. It's all just vague rumors and speculation. Further, it's not clear that ANY of these projects are really needed or will ever to come to fruition. Right now, it's little more than hobby-ware.
Member since:
2008-01-31
Funny, as I read about Midori, once you tear away all the marketing fluff, the core ideas are pretty much the same as what we are already working on over in SharpOS (http://www.sharpos.org) and Ensemble (http://www.ensemble-os.org). Especially with us over in Ensemble, we're writing a kernel HAL layer that is meant to be run inside a host CLR environment.
Members from both projects are also writing an all-C# compiler and CLR/VES layer, and we have already formed a cooperative alliance group to foster this, called MOSA - The Managed Operating System Alliance. The compiler and CLR layers will (at least in planning and code skeleton, at this point) have pluggable assemblies to handle the actual native machine code emission, as well as 32/64/whatever-future bit independence (just a redefinition of IntPtr, among a few other things at the compiler level). No need for Bartok and C++/assembly shims here.
Likewise, the supposed "transparent distributable computing", which really is just an extension of how the OS hooks the .Net Remoting API, is the same.
For the disbelievers, SharpOS has been bootable for at least a few months now, and Ensemble is getting somewhat close, pending machine code emission work on the common MOSA compiler.
It'll at least be interesting to see where MS goes with Midori, if anywhere. At least they're showing some signs (if only hand-waving) of applying Singularity to something "real". But in the meantime, there are others that are already working on this, in the OSS realm, who will probably get there a lot sooner than MS.