On 9/13/18, John john.r.moser@gmail.com wrote:
I'm surveying the field at the moment and looking at all the advances made in computer software—security, managed language runtimes, hypervisors, real-time OS—and trying to project the possibilities for a next-generation operating system. There's enough divergence that a rewrite from scratch might make sense; and besides, I've drawn up a method for getting a self-hosting CLR running with only anonymous memory allocation and VFS file page mapping, along with a method of getting the CLR to self-host and getting it up and running before an actual OS kernel.
It seems like things might be moving away from managed code somewhat. Safer native code languages like Rust have been starting to become more popular in recent years. I think safer native code is a better approach than Java/.NET-style manged code, since there's no performance penalty and the runtime is just a library rather than a more complex VM (which is often written in an unsafe native code language, leaving more attack surface than a system in which everything security-critical is written in a safer language). I'm taking the safer native code approach in the OS that I'm writing (a Rust-based next-generation Unix-like OS that will somewhat resemble QNX and Plan 9; https://gitlab.com/uxrt).