Such defeatism is why we have to put up with clunky 50 year old abstractions and the over-complicated "ecosystem" of webshit we built on top of them.

(firstly, this is kind of off topic, since OS design is usually orthogonal to processor architecture, unless you've got something really funky going on)

Acknowledging the huge amount of work that needs to be done for an alternative to be adopted is not defeatism, it's realism. There have been plenty of minority, research, or experimental operating systems over the past few decades. Hardly any of them persisted, because it's a very Darwinian winner-take-all market.

> Acknowledging the huge amount of work that needs to be done for an alternative to be adopted is not defeatism, it's realism.

IMO this is bit of a "the chicken or the egg came first?" problem.

The industry had a lot of needs in terms of computing when computers started becoming physically small. The very first few things -- OS, any tech paradigmae, chip designs, shell architecture and what-have-you -- that seemed to do the job good enough got 99.9% of investments and mindshare and thus even if everything we currently use is ugly and barely working, there's no economic interest to revisit the other competing standards from the dawn of computing and see if there are golden geese hidden in there somewhere.

So when a carpenter tells you "I need a natural wood and screws because that's what works best" you really should be reading that as: "nobody tried to invent better materials and joinery techniques or tooling so I'll stick to what I know".

"Good enough" is not a slogan to follow.

I really want to see an introspective, single-user, programming-centric, graphical operating system that isn’t dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. A new ISA seems like a great opportunity to ditch the current models of computing for something more Genera-esque, since we now can produce commodity hardware that is powerful enough to achieve good performance at reasonable prices.

You and me both. I want something I can actually feel like I'm in control of because it not only respects me as a user but also is built on simple metaphors that map well to reality, allowing me to actually understand how it works without untangling a horrible spaghetti mess of legacy systems patched together with spit and rubberbands. Something meant to help me make my life better instead of making someone else a bunch of money making me miserable.

Sadly, I'm not aware of anybody working on such a project. Most people making "OS"s these days either just make yet-another-linux-distribution and confirm that old saying about the definition of insanity, or they're content to make some completely academic kernel that no one can use for anything but academic purposes. I wish I had the skills to start one myself.

How useful would a full-screen GUI application that runs on existing operating systems be? That way eliminates dealing with device drivers or building custom hardware.

The Lisp-all-the-way-down part doesn’t seem as useful as it was originally. You could get 80% of the functionality with 10% of the work of a full OS.

Part of the problem with that approach is that you're still reliant on the host OS and have just pasted a new layer of abstraction over the old one. Kinda like the web. You haven't really fixed any of the problems of the underlying platform, while at the same time you've added complexity and bloat.

I think there is, perhaps, value in a middle ground. You could take the Linux kernel (chosen here for its existing driver support, openness, stable syscall ABI, and presence of virtualization and namespacing features), but throw away basically everything on top of it and build a new "operating environment". Then, over time, you could fork the kernel away, ditching legacy syscalls and features, maybe creating a stable driver ABI finally, etc.

> The Lisp-all-the-way-down part doesn’t seem as useful as it was originally. You could get 80% of the functionality with 10% of the work of a full OS.

You're missing the point. If the only goal was "functionality," a quick-and-dirty hack on top of existing systems would suffice.

However, the GP wants a system that's reasonably comprehensible all the way down, so he can have some confidence that it's not working against him in some way. The accidental complexity of decades of legacy software works strongly against that.

I completely agree with you, which is why my highest-level comment in this thread suggested using a new ISA, too. However, for practical reasons, it would be a ton of work to design and build hardware and a complete operating system. That’s the holy grail, of course, but it’s going to be hard to achieve without a large company backing it up.

> I really want to see an introspective, single-user, programming-centric, graphical operating system that isn’t dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.

Hit the nail on the head.

Things are impossibly complex and convoluted nowadays. And working against us more often than not -- as you said.

It feels like we really need to start over. All the way down to the CPU and GPU hardware architecture.

Take a look at plan9 and haikuOS. O am not implying that this is a solved problem, just intriguing projects.

> Acknowledging the huge amount of work that needs to be done for an alternative to be adopted is not defeatism, it's realism.

Realism is often just a mask over defeatism.

Unless you are using programming languages that are native to the platform (which also happen to be clunky and 50 year old) you never have to deal with those 50 year old abstractions.

These chips aren’t going to be running browsers in the near future, unless you mean in a TV (one of the last places you could find MIPS).

The market they are headed for is embedded, where every cent of the BOM counts. Licensing costs can add up surprisingly fast as part of that.

Server parts are a big step above that - MIPS used to play there, but after a short peak they failed many times over. It tried in the networking and embedded space for a while, but then had its lunch stolen by all the cheap ARM vendors from below, and stomped on by x86 from above.

And then desktop/laptop parts? Unless you are Apple (and even then), pushing a new arch on the desktop is a massive, expensive task, and I can’t see it being worthwhile.

>> The market they are headed for is embedded...

Are you sure? RISC-V is about to explode in the embedded space. I always ask our suppliers about their RISC-V plans and it's shifted over the last 3 years. They've gone from "what's that?" to the point where they are all aware, some are hedging, and some are going full tilt but not quite at the stage of "here are our offerings". Anyone who is not currently a MIPS user (chip maker) in this space is years behind.

> Anyone who is not currently a MIPS user (chip maker) in this space is years behind.

RISC-V user?

Or, in general, getting code to run on it at all. Almost every OS that hasn’t offered C (and arguably some sort of POSIX) has floundered without gaining traction.

Almost every OS that has offered C and POSIX has floundered without getting traction, too.

The number of operating systems that have succeeded in any real way is tiny, and probably not big enough to draw any conclusions from. None of the major players today got to where they are now by following the conventional wisdom of their day. I assume the next big OS (or three) will similarly succeed by breaking all the rules we thought we knew.

Webkit is pretty portable.