Enough time has passed that I feel safe blogging about my prior project here at Microsoft, “Midori”. In the months to come, I’ll publish a dozen-or-so articles covering the most interesting aspects of this project, and my key take-aways.
Midori was a research/incubation project to explore ways of innovating throughout Microsoft’s software stack. This spanned all aspects, including the programming language, compilers, OS, its services, applications, and the overall programming models. We had a heavy bias towards cloud, concurrency, and safety. The project included novel “cultural” approaches too, being 100% developers and very code-focused, looking more like the Microsoft of today and hopefully tomorrow, than it did the Microsoft of 8 years ago when the project began.
The first two articles have already been published. This looks like it’s going to be an excellent series.
The first thing I thought when reading the title was the browser Midori :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_%28web_browser%29
http://midori-browser.org/
Really, thanks a lot for pointing me here. I know where I will be spending my free time. First task: Try to remember or figure out the difference between Singularity and Midori
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system)
Edit: It was right there on the Midori page: “It has been reported[1][2] to be a possible commercial implementation of the Singularity operating system”
Edited 2015-11-18 12:16 UTC
Yeah, after reading the articles, it seems likely that Midori was based on *some* of the ideas of singularity, with others from other sources brought in as well. I’d guess with research like this at such a fundamental level where you don’t need to worry about backwards compatibility with existing software, it makes sense to make non-backwards compatible changes deep to the system. And without a clear idea of what is best/better (this is research after all) and two different teams, keeping two completely different names and code bases might make sense.
Its pretty crazy cool. Kind of cool that parts of it are making its way into modern operating systems. But completely understandable why they won’t be commercialized.