Singularity?

[unixronin]

That's the codename for Microsoft's new research OS.  (Well, I say "new" ... they've been developing it for "more than five years".)  It's written in Microsoft's C#, which they claim prevents the possibility of buffer overruns.

"Singularity is not the next Windows," Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, said in a statement.  "Think of it like a concept car.  It is a prototype operating system designed from the ground up to test-drive a new paradigm for how operating systems and applications interact with one another.  We are making it available to the community in the hope that it will enable researchers to try out new ideas quickly."

Could be interesting.  (Shame the architecture diagram in the article is too small to read, though.)  Some of the features they've designed in could potentially be very good ... but they also could be very bad.  (I might mention the registry as a well-known example of a good-sounding idea gone bad.)

Comments

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

ObDisclosure: I am technically an employee of Sun Microsystems. My day job involves evangelization for Java and Solaris. My agreement with them is that I only say things I really believe--I am not a marketroid.

That said, forgive me for howling with laughter at the idea C# prevents the possibility of buffer overruns. Java, maybe, due to some features of its design. Once you start writing JNI to deal with low-level devices, though, all bets are off. C# has the exact same problem (through P/Invoke), but wait, it gets worse: to allow languages like C/C++ to run on the CLR, Microsoft explicitly allows code to deal with pointers by marking code blocks as "unsafe".

How much do you want to bet unsafe code is used in Singularity? How much do you want to bet low-level drivers are done with heavy use of P/Invoke calling out to unsafe languages?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I don't take sucker bets. :)






(footnote: there's something weird going on with LJ the past few days that's causing just-posted comments to not show up immediately, sometimes making me think the comment didn't post....)