Heh, reminds me of those boxes Sun used to make that only ran Java. (I don’t know how far down Java actually went; perhaps it was Solaris for the lower layers now that I think about it…)
I do miss the Solaris 10/OpenSolaris tech though. I don’t know anything that comes close to it today.
dtrace/zones/smf/zfs/iscsi/... and the integration between them all was top notch. One could create a zone, spin up a clone, do some computation, trash the filesystem and then just throw the clone away... in very short time. Also, that whole loop happened without interacting with zfs directly; I know that some of these things have been ported but the ports miss the integration.
eg: zfs on Linux is just a filesystem. zfs on Solaris was the base of a bunch of technology. smf tied much of it together.
eg: dtrace gave you access all the way down to individual read/write operations per disk in a raid-z and all the way up to the top of your application running inside of a zone. One tool with massive reach and very little overhead.
Not much compels me to go back to the ecosystem; I've been burned once already.
"What if we made a new WASM-based platform for apps, separate from the browser?"
I do agree that we tend to run a lot in a web-browser or browser environment though. It seems like a pattern that started as a hack but grew into its own thing through convenience.
It would be interesting to sit down with a small group and figure out exactly what is good/bad about it and design a new thing around the desired pattern that doesn't involve a browser-in-the-loop.