Microsoft Research Simplifies the OS

By Doug Barney

Pop quiz: What is the number oneproblem with Microsoft Vista? It’s too complex. Too many features lead toinstability, difficulty of use, and incompatibilities. Like the human body, thefatter the client, the more complications it has.

Microsoft Research(Redmond, WA) is taking the opposite approach with anoperating system project called singularity. Written completely in C#, theprototype OS isolates software components from each other, reduces thepossibility of buffer overflows (hackers will be so disappointed!), has amechanism to pre-inspect code to insure it will be a good OS citizen, haspre-defined and disciplined ways for components to communicate, and finally theOS tests components to make sure they actually work together.

The biggestbreakthrough? That the singularity is built from scratch, getting rid of allthat old troublesome legacy code.

One of the biggest challenges for Microsoftis translating the phenomenal things it does in research to real-world products.Here’s hoping some of singularity makes it into the next version ofWindows.

http://research.microsoft.com/news/featurestories/publish/Singularity.aspx?0hp=n3