Singularity
Mary Jo Foley of Microsoft Watch reports that Microsoft Research is cooking up Singularity, a new micro-kernal operating system.
[tease]
“What would a software platform look like if it was designed from scratch with the primary goal of dependability?” reads the opening of the Microsoft research report.
[tease]
“Singularity is not Windows. Every line of code was written from scratch,” said Galen Hunt, a senior researcher with Microsoft Research who is helping to spearhead the Singularity project.
Working from the ultimate clean sheet of paper, they’ve also invented a new language, not to mention a new run-time environment.
[tease]
But the OS is currently written entirely in a combination of Microsoft’s C# programming language, as well as a derivative of C#, which the team is calling “Sing#.” (Sing# is a derivative of Spec#, which is a derivative of C#.) The ultimate goal is to write the OS entirely in Sing#, Hunt said.
While Singularity does rely on Microsoft’s C#, it is not making use of Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime (CLR) or the Java virtual machine. Instead, the team is relying on “Bartok,“ a Microsoft-Research-developed compiler and run-time environment.
We should all feel good that our Microsoft Monopoly Tax is funding interesting computer science work. Maybe Singularity will end the blue screen of death scourge.
[via tech.memeorandum]