The real progress nowadays, since OSes have not stepped up, is in Kernel Bypass. (Show me a fancy new abstraction, and my reaction is, "Great—how do I bypass it?") We have para-kernels, demi-kernels, uni-kernels, all to get closer to the hardware.

Probably future machines should have lots of FPGAs, and easy access to claim and program them. We will need good languages for the latter, although probably C++ will end up being that.