http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/ Pro | The lazy guy channel

http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/

Progress in mainstream operating systems design seems to be stalled. The world has settled on unix-like design from 50 years ago. More than 10 years ago Microsoft Research tried to design a “safe-and-secure-by-construction” OS - Midori. The project has predictably failed but it had quite a few correct ideas which are slowly moving into mainstream languages and operating systems. The series of blog posts behind the link describes the key design and implementation details of the project.

Here are the 3 most notable things which were pioneered in that project and became mainstream by now:
1. Midori was programmed in a language which prevents any kind of data races and invalid memory access by design. Rust is gaining momentum making the same promises.
2. All OS operations were asynchronous by default and the language had first class support for async/await. C# (the first mainstream language to implement first-class async support) borrowed this feature from Midori. Nowadays all languages are expected to support async programming style. io_uring on the other hand is slowly turning Linux into an async-first OS.
3. Since OS was written in a safe language, arbitrary code could easily be injected at various points in kernel without compromise of security or stability. Linux is slowly gaining the same feature in a limited form with eBPF.