It mainly mean that instead of using a shell that runs /bin/sh and associated control commands (ls, cat, whatever), you've to bring your own shell code and call the functions yourself. I assume one would write such a loader in erlang that serves a webpage to query any content from the fs, database, etc.

Also, IPC seems to be mainly network based, which means latency. Some modern OS designs function with the same base ideas: managed runtime, small codebase, fully contained processes but use system-local IPC and thus, do have multi-processing (instead of multi-nodes, or in fact, in addition to multi-nodes).

Maybe some of those should be written in a web-friendly language and ship and httpd for adoption (so far they've not been adopted as the cost of rewriting apps > using archaic OSes)

Ideally I'd see an OS with:

- above characteristics (singularity, plan9 like)

- Simple, fast, efficient filesystem (i.e. with features and performance as good as popular databases) - so you don't need a database server

- clustered resources that are language-aware: filesystem (database), cpu, memory are networked resources, but you get control from the code about what is executed on the same local instance (ie same physical system) and what can be shipped to "any instance" - this brings true, full elasticity. (all this is also a little plan9-ish but not exactly)